Budget
- £21+
Expertise
- Expert
- Beginner
- Intermediate
Features
- Drag&Drop Builder
- Checkout
- Subscriptions
- SEO Tools
- Shipping & Tax
- Email Marketing
- Inventory Management
- Customer Accounts
Pick the wrong apps and you will spend more time installing and uninstalling than actually selling. The Shopify App Store has thousands of options, but most of the genuinely useful ones have a free plan that covers everything a small store needs to get started.
If you are not on Shopify yet, you can start for £1 a month for your first three months, which gives you enough time to properly test everything on this list.
The five apps below cover email marketing, product recommendations, subscriptions, loyalty, and conversion optimisation. We tested all of them on real stores using only the free tiers.
Klaviyo is the email marketing app most serious Shopify stores end up on eventually. The free plan covers up to 500 contacts and 500 email sends per month, which is enough to build abandoned cart sequences, welcome emails, and basic segmentation before you pay a penny.
It connects directly to Shopify and triggers emails based on purchase history, browsing behaviour, and cart activity. Setup takes a couple of hours from scratch if you follow their onboarding flow.
Best for stores that are actively building a customer list and want automation from day one. If you are just starting out without a list yet, install it now so you are collecting subscribers properly before you need them.
Wiser adds product recommendation widgets to your store: customers also bought, frequently bought together, recently viewed. The free plan covers up to 500 monthly orders and places these on product pages and the cart. If your average order value is low and you want to increase it without running ads, this is one of the cheapest ways to do it.
Recharge manages subscriptions: let customers subscribe to products and receive them on a schedule. The free plan is limited in features, but it lets you test whether subscriptions make sense for your product range before committing to a paid tier. Worth installing if you sell consumables such as coffee, skincare, or supplements where repeat purchases are part of the model.
Smile handles loyalty and rewards. The free plan gives you a basic points programme: customers earn points on purchases and redeem them for discounts. It does not require much configuration to go live. Best for stores with repeat customers rather than one-off buyers.
OptiMonk creates popup campaigns: exit-intent offers, email capture, discount reveals, and cart abandonment messages. The free plan covers up to 15,000 pageviews per month and includes all the main campaign types.
It integrates with Klaviyo, so emails captured by OptiMonk feed directly into your sequences. The combination of OptiMonk for capture and Klaviyo for nurture is a solid, fully free setup for stores under 500 contacts.
Be realistic about popup design. A popup that fires on every homepage visit will hurt conversions more than help them. Use exit-intent triggers and test different offers before rolling anything out site-wide.
All five are worth having, but if we had to prioritise: install Klaviyo first. Email is the highest-return channel for most ecommerce stores and the one tool you will regret not setting up earlier.
Add OptiMonk once you have a welcome sequence ready to feed captured leads into. Wiser and Smile make sense once you have regular traffic and repeat customers. Recharge only if subscriptions fit your product model.