You’ve finally mastered how to set up your BigCommerce site to run your small or medium-sized business (SMB). Now, it’s time to start exploring all the useful BigCommerce plugins you can add to your site to increase your conversion rates, lower cart abandonment and offer additional features to improve the user experience.
Though your site is set up and ready for consumers to find, your pages may not be running at their full potential, or your site may not be fully optimized for mobile. Here, we will explore a few of the top BigCommerce apps to help you boost sales and ensure that your eCommerce site is the best that it can be.
Optimized Checkout Apps
The checkout process is where eCommerce stores tend to lose a lot of potential customers. Ensuring that your checkout process is optimized, easy and effective, becomes much simpler with one of the many BigCommerce apps designed to improve your store’s checkout process.
Checkout Boost will alert customers of any available deals and promotions to encourage them to make a purchase now. The countdown clock will create a sense of urgency to complete the sale and claim their reward. Plus, it allows customers to share the offer on social channels. Increasing social shares and website traffic will translate into an uptick in revenue and help grow your brand presence online.
One Page Checkout can be an expensive feature to invest in, but it provides consumers with a very streamlined, one-page experience. This is critical to decrease cart abandonment rates and increase conversions. Luckily, there are some BigCommerce plugins that can help make the process easy for SMBs.
PayPal One Touch allows more than 170 million PayPal users to complete their purchase immediately by accessing their login details on mobile and desktop. This help expedite the checkout process and capitalizes on spontaneous buying behavior. For your eCommerce business, that mean more revenue with a minimum of work.
Optimizely
Keeping track of which pages on your BigCommerce site are optimized can be a tricky and tedious task. For SMB owners looking to test their individual page optimization, you can integrate Optimizely into your store to learn more about how your pages are behaving and how consumers are interacting with them.
An A/B split testing program, Optimizely will use multiple versions of your landing pages to test and track how users interact with each version. You can use these results to see which features consumers respond to and which features fail to inspire action. Implementing the changes recommended by Optimizely is one of the top ways to make sure you’re maximizing conversions.
Apptive
While eCommerce, in general, has been slowly dominating the shopping world over brick-and-mortar stores, mobile shopping is gaining popularity, too. According to eMarketer, $1.4 trillion of the $2.3 trillion eCommerce industry was generated by mobile sales. It’s estimated that this number could skyrocket to $3.5 trillion, which would make up nearly 75 percent of all eCommerce sales.
Needless to say, if mobile commerce is the future, it’s going to be extremely important that your SMB site is optimized for mobile devices. Designed for people who are not familiar with in-depth coding, Apptive allows users to connect to the app through BigCommerce and design a streamlined mobile site with easy drag-and-drop control. This plugin makes it simple to build, secure, operate and scale a mobile experience for your site.
Abandoned Cart Recovery
The number one issue eCommerce stores face on a daily basis is cart abandonment rates. Studies have shown that 75 percent of online shoppers leave an eCommerce site with items in their cart before they complete the checkout process.
Fortunately, there are ways to decrease this number, though cart abandonment will never dissipate entirely. Through the Springbot Exchange, you can leverage Onsite Abandonment to target unknown site visitors and turn them into customers.
Onsite Abandonment allows you to schedule targeted email campaigns to those consumers who have visited your site, but left without purchasing the items in their cart. These emails can entice consumers to convert with special promotional offers.
You can also utilize but utilizing the Abandoned Cart Recovery app is to effectively an easy and effective way to lower abandoned cart rates.
Smile.io
In the business world, it’s often repeated that acquiring a new customer is much more expensive than retaining previous customers. Providing consumers with an incentive to return to your site can encourage people to become regular customers. Previously known as Sweet Tooth rewards, the Smile.io app helps you offer customers several options to earn rewards—sharing a post on social media, signing up for an account on the site, referring a friend via social media channels or making a purchase.
LiveChat
A helpful addition to any BigCommerce store, LiveChat, is an app that allows customers to instantly connect with a customer service representative right from your website. Consumers tend to like using chatbot devices while shopping because it’s an easy and convenient way to ask a question and receive an instant answer. Though LiveChat offers a free month trial, it is $16 per month to continue using–but it’s easy to find other chatbot apps for free, including jivochat.
Conclusion
While running a successful eCommerce business is challenging, savvy marketers use plugins to streamline their operations and capture revenue at every turn. They make it easier to increase your conversion rate, combat cart abandonment and deliver a smooth user experience. If you take advantage of the BigCommerce plugins, you’ll be on track to capture essential sales and grow your brand presence online.
