11 BigCommerce apps that drive revenue and customer retention

Despite 2022’s economic challenges, global eCommerce sales show few signs of decline. A 2022 study from Morgan Stanley projects the eCommerce market to increase steadily from $3.3 trillion today to $5.4 trillion in 2026.

Your ability to take advantage of this growth starts with your choice of eCommerce platform. It must not only provide a frictionless customer experience but also provide you with the insights to adapt to changes in customer behavior.

Shopify remains the most popular eCommerce software solution for reaching these goals. But the number of BigCommerce store owners shot up 16% year-over-year in Q3 2022. Like Shopify, there are a range of BigCommerce apps that help you customize your online shopping experience without creating friction. These apps help to play a vital role in increasing BigCommerce revenue.

In fact, we’ve identified 11 BigCommerce apps that can help you enhance your overall customer experience, while also laying the foundation for long-term BigCommerce growth.

1. Alloy: Automate routine site tasks to save time

Alloy’s workflows automate routine tasks, freeing your eCommerce business to focus on more important matters.

Suppose you want to send an SMS notification to customers who’ve purchased five times, inviting them to enroll in your monthly subscription. If you use BigCommerce, and if Alloy integrates with your SMS provider, you can set up a workflow that triggers this SMS automatically. That saves time compared to manually compiling a list of customers and scheduling the message. 

Skincare brand L’Amarue uses Alloy to sync their logistics provider with responses to an online product-matching quiz. Say a customer selects “Acne” as a concern while completing the quiz and ends up buying a product. 

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The logistics provider receives a notification to include a pamphlet on acne treatment with the order.

Key features

• Alloy has hundreds of pre-built workflows that you simply turn on if you have the integrations the workflow requires. You can build your own workflows as well. 
• Use data generated from these workflows to create granular customer profiles for more personalized marketing campaigns. Perhaps customers who take advantage of your SMS offer prefer to receive communications from that channel.

Pricing

• Alloy has a free plan, but it limits you to five automated workflows.
• Their $50 per month paid plan allows 20 workflows. But you’re only allowed to use those workflows 5,000 times each month. 
• Beyond 20 workflows, you need to contact Alloy for a quote.

2. Attentive: Send urgent messages and offers with SMS

Attentive is an SMS provider that sends targeted marketing messages based on a customer’s browsing and purchasing activity.

BigCommerce and Attentive enjoy a native integration, so it’s simple to pull product images a customer has viewed into upsell and abandoned cart SMS campaigns. Set these campaigns up using pre-built templates and watch SMS orders flow into your BigCommerce order management dashboard.

Chamberlain Coffee uses Attentive SMS to recommend new products to customers who’ve opted in.

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Key features

• A/B test SMS message elements much like you would in an email campaign.
• Place SMS enrollment invitations at multiple customer touchpoints, such as in Instagram Stories and at the end of marketing emails.
• Create mobile SMS enrollment pop-ups on product pages with an incentive on those products if the user signs up. Perhaps offer a subscriber an additional 10% off their first shipment if they opt in to SMS.

Pricing

• Attentive requires a consultation before quoting a price.

3. Ordergroove: Boost customer lifetime value

Ordergroove is a Relationship Commerce platform that uses subscriptions to boost customer lifetime value and grow predictable, recurring BigCommerce revenue – both of which are critical to building business stability in volatile markets like today. 

The subscription technology company is one of the only subscription platforms that offers an integrated checkout, ensuring consumers have a frictionless end-to-end checkout experience. 

When evaluating an eCommerce subscription platform, it’s critical to work with a partner that fully integrates with BigCommerce. 

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A BigCommerce subscription platform that doesn’t fully integrate will use a “hijacked checkout,” which forces customers to bounce from one platform to another to pay. A hijacked check can reduce subscription enrollment by as much as 40%.

Key features

• Ordergroove uses artificial intelligence to predict when a customer might churn due to overstock, allowing you to respond with a customer retention-focused marketing campaign.
• The platform gives the customer maximum control over their subscriptions. With only a click or two, customers can skip a shipment and swap products in and out of orders.
• It makes it easy for customers to see the value of enrolling in a subscription compared to buying a product once.

Pricing

• Ordergroove requires a consultation before quoting a price.

4. Gorgias: Enhance the eCommerce experience with proactive customer support

Gorgias is a proactive customer service app. Their omnichannel platform helps your support team contact your customers before problems start.

Imagine being able to contact a browsing eCommerce customer in real-time to ask if they have questions about a product. The answers agents provide could mean the difference between a subscription enrollment, one-off purchase, cart abandonment, or costly return.

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Better yet, thanks to the integration between Gorgias and BigCommerce, agents can quickly learn whether the customer has ordered previously. The agent can use that information to get a better sense of what the customer prefers.

Key features

• Customers can communicate with Gorgias via SMS, live chat, email, social media, and voice.
• Gorgias prioritizes tickets from VIP customers based on intelligence you set up in the system. Base that intelligence on order frequency or value.

Pricing

• Gorgias doesn’t offer a free plan.
• Starter plan: $10 per month for up to 50 helpdesk tickets 
• Basic plan: $60 per month for up to 300 tickets
• Pro plan: $360 per month for up to 2,000 tickets
• Advanced plan: $900 per month for up to 5,000 tickets
• Enterprise plan: Requires a consultation

5. Klaviyo: Segment customers for more targeted email marketing

Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform specializing in email and customer segmentation. 

With support for several email Big Commerce apps, Klaviyo stands out because it’s more of an email intelligence app. As customers interact with your emails and order from them, Klaviyo gathers rich data that aid segmentation. 

Create segments based on certain criteria and watch Klaviyo add customers to the segments automatically when conditions are met. 

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Suppose your VIP customers need to spend $10,000 to qualify for a special email rewards sequence. Klaviyo identifies these customers once they hit that threshold and moves them into the VIP segment.

Key features

• Use Klaviyo’s Flow Builder to create personalized email campaigns based on a customer’s status. For example, create a welcome campaign for new subscribers. 
• Use Klaviyo customer segments to create audiences for Facebook and Instagram lookalike ad campaigns. Say you want to promote a new product release in an ad. Create a segment in Klaviyo of customers who’ve purchased a similar item, quickly sync the segment with Meta, and only Meta users similar to that segment will see the ad. 

Pricing

• Klaviyo offers a free plan for merchants with up to 250 contacts. This plan only allows 500 email sends per month, however. 
• Paid plans are based on the number of contacts and emails you wish to send. For example, if you have between 6,500 and 10,000 contacts and want to send 100,000 emails per month, paid plans start at $150.

6. Lucky Orange: Detect eCommerce friction in real-time

Lucky Orange offers a suite of helpful tools such as heatmaps and surveys to show you how well — or how poorly — your eCommerce customer experience enables conversions.

When you launched your online store, you did so with a certain customer journey in mind. You designed every button, every image, and every prompt to move your customers into the sales funnel. Lucky Orange reveals — often visually — the journey customers actually take, which may or may not be what you intended.

Key features

• Use heatmaps to see where customers are clicking. Use this data to reorganize your storefront, so customers more intuitively click into your sales funnel. Connect Google Analytics to segment click journeys by traffic source (Google PPC, Facebook, etc.).

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• Add quick, one-question surveys to your BigCommerce store that appear whenever a browsing customer completes certain actions. Lucky Orange surveys can consist of open-ended or multiple-choice questions or star ratings.

Pricing

• Each of Lucky Orange’s paid plans includes a seven-day free trial. 
• Free plan: 500 pageviews per month + surveys
• Build plan: $18 per month for up to 10,000 pageviews per month + surveys
• Grow plan: $35 per month for up to 40,000 pageviews per month + surveys
• Expand plan: $70 per month for up to 100,000 pageviews per month + surveys
• Scale plan: $150 per month for up to 300,000 pageviews per month + surveys
• Enterprise plan: Requires a consultation

7. Privy: Improve conversion rates with scheduled pop-ups

Privy uses pop-ups and other devices to improve conversions through urgency. Its integration with BigCommerce means you can place these “conversion aids” at specific eCommerce touchpoints where customers are prone to dropping out of the sales funnel.

Say your product pages give customers the option of buying an item once or subscribing to it. With Privy, program a pop-up to appear with a promo code offering a deeper discount on a customer’s first subscription shipment. Include a countdown timer indicating that the promo code will expire in 12 hours. Then look at your month-over-month subscription enrollments to see if the pop-up improved conversions.

BBQ Rub Club uses Privy to create a “Spin to Win” pop-up that encourages email opt-ins.

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Using gamification, BBQ Rub Club dangles the notion of 20% off a first order in front of new customers, a strong incentive to sign up.

Key features

• Privy lets you install a free shipping bar in your shopping cart so customers can see how much they need to order to get free shipping. 
• Privy integrates with Klaviyo. This means that if you use a pop-up to grow your email list, those customer data flow into Klaviyo.

Pricing

• Free plan: Includes their on-site engagement tools
• Starter plan: $15 per month lets you use their email marketing tool for up to 250 contacts and engagement tools
• Growth plan: $45 per month grants you email for up to 3,000 contacts and SMS for up to 500 contacts + their engagement tools

8. ShipBob: Optimize the post-purchase shipping experience

ShipBob is a third-party logistics provider whose app lets you manage inventory across multiple warehouses and effectively communicate shipment tracking details with customers. It’s a good app for large online retailers who want to fully outsource fulfillment.

If customers can’t access shipping information, or their shipment arrives later than expected, your brand could suffer. In a study from ShipStation, 83% of consumers are likely to switch brands after a negative delivery or shipping experience.

ShipBob has a native integration with Gorgias, so agents can program chatbots that give customers shipping updates upon request.

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This integration means that when a customer clicks on the “Track an order” option in the Gorgias-generated pop-up above, ShipBob automatically displays a shipment’s transit status.

Key features

• Set up email notifications with ShipBob’s inventory management software to remind you to replenish inventory before subscription orders are set to go out.
• Offers custom kitting services so subscribers can have the “unboxing” experience they expect. 

Pricing

• ShipBob requires a consultation before quoting a price. Pricing depends on how much storage you need for your products, the complexity of the kitting process, and more.

9. Taggshop: Boost sales and reach with social commerce

Taggshop lets you incorporate shoppable Instagram content into your BigCommerce store. Repurpose content you create for Instagram as well as content generated by followers to better engage new and existing customers.

According to a 2021 Stackla report, 59% of consumers say user-generated content (UGC) is the “most authentic type of content.” With Taggshop, not only can you display Instagram UGC on your homepage, but you can also link visitors to the product pages of items featured in that content.

Take Eureka Furniture. An Instagram follower posted an image of one of Eureka’s dining room sets, and thanks to Taggshop it ended up in Eureka’s shoppable homepage slider.

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As an added benefit, when customers see the quality of your Instagram content, they can follow you on that platform, growing your reach there.

Key features

• Measure the number of clicks each piece of content receives, so you can determine the type of content that resonates most with visitors.
• Quickly identify influencers generating the most UGC and partner with them on future campaigns.

Pricing

• Taggshop offers a 14-day trial for each paid plan. 
• Growth plan: $49 per month for 100 product tags across Instagram posts, Stories, and Reels
• Professional plan: $149 per month for unlimited product tags
• Premium plan: $299 per month; uses AI to pull the most appropriate posts for your customers

10. Yotpo Reviews: Build social proof with customer feedback

Yotpo Reviews is a versatile app that makes it easy to request and post customer reviews around your eCommerce store. Product reviews build social proof, and if the reviews are mostly positive, they’ll make customers more comfortable buying. 

Reviews play a huge role in a customer’s decision to purchase from one business over another. In a 2021 study from BrightLocal, 85% of consumers consider the “overall average star rating of the business” as a determining factor.

Because Yotpo integrates with Klaviyo, you can request reviews from specific Klaviyo customer segments, such as your VIPs. Fashion brand Princess Polly displays the reviews on their product pages from most recent to least recent.

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Yotpo also integrates with Google Shopping ads, so you can include starred reviews to increase an ad’s effectiveness.

Key features

• Yotpo lets customers submit photos and videos along with their reviews to increase authenticity.
• When you enable it, the app uses AI to share your best customer reviews automatically on your chosen social media networks.

Pricing

• Free plan: 50 review requests per month. These reviews cannot include photos or videos.
• Growth plan: $15 per month; lets you use reviews in Google snippets and include photos and videos
• Prime plan: $199 per month; includes Klaviyo integration and widest use of reviews

11. Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals: Increase retention with a customizable loyalty program

The Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals app helps you increase customer engagement via customizable loyalty programs based on points, spend, purchases, or referrals.

Loyalty programs are not going anywhere. According to a 2022 report from Clarus Commerce, 78% of consumers would actually pay for a “premium loyalty program” if its benefits were valuable enough.

Suppose you think like Princess Polly, and want to reward points based on a TikTok follow, a third purchase, or a signup for SMS messages. 

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Yotpo lets you set each of these up and offers analytics showing you which option leads to the most point accruals.

Key features

• The app includes a “checkout module,” where customers can see their points total at checkout and decide how many to redeem.
• Create a referral program in which both the person referring and the person referred receive loyalty rewards.

Pricing

• Free plan: Limited loyalty point use. For example, customers can’t redeem points for free products — just discounts. Only 100 orders are allowed with points redemption.
• Silver plan: $29 per month; unlimited loyalty points use and unlimited orders
• Gold plan: $249 per month; unlimited integrations

The best BigCommerce apps depend on your business goals

If you’re looking to boost your BigCommerce growth, installing all the apps mentioned here won’t automatically make your BigCommerce store unstoppable. The right combination depends on your business size, product, and customer preferences. You may need to audit your chosen BigCommerce apps regularly until you find the right mix.
To learn more about how Ordergroove helps BigCommerce users optimize their customer experiences, click here for a free demo.