We've been running BirdRock Baby on Shopify's e-commerce platform for nearly 8 years now. It's the perfect place to host an apparel brand's online store, but you'll definitely want to use some apps from the Shopify App Store to enhance the capabilities of your storefront.
Here are a few of our favorite Shopify apps for apparel stores.
1. Shopify Bundles
Bundles are a critical feature for apparel stores. They're a great way to increase your average order value and get more products in the hands of your customers.
We used to have to implement a 3rd party app to set up bundles, which was pretty clunky. Now Shopify has their own native bundles app.
The only annoying limitation of this app is the maximum of 100 variants in any one bundle. So if you've got a pair of shoes that comes in 6 different sizes, you could offer a "choose 2 colors" bundle (6 sizes for color 1 * 6 sizes for color 2 = 36 sizes total) but not a "choose 3 colors" bundle (6 * 6 * 6 = 216, over the variant limit).
Shopify is supposed to increase the variant limit from 100 to 2,000 which will go a long way to solve this problem.
2. Lighthouse: Slack Alerts
We run all of our business communication through Slack, and it's super useful to have notifications on our most important orders. That's where Lighthouse comes in.
This app allows us to set up triggers and filters so our team never misses an important order. We use it for wholesale orders, local pickup, and more.
3. Wholesale Pricing Discount B2B
Speaking of wholesale, this is the app we use for our wholesale portal. It allows us to set up custom pricing for customers that are tagged as wholesale and to have a totally hands-off self service wholesale model.
If you're not on Shopify Plus and wholesale is part of your business, you definitely want an app like this. We've been happy with this one.
4. Fraud Filter
This is another Shopify native app, which for some reason has lousy reviews but in our experience it works great. Occasionally you just run into a problem customer that you never want to hear from again. Fraud Filter allows you to tag their email, name, address, or other fields and automatically cancel/refund their orders.
Life is too short to deal with painful customers.
5. Lifetimely
Apparel is an industry where customers will come purchase from you again and again (if they like your product). Determining their lifetime value is crucial for making a decision on how aggressively to spend on ads. That's what Lifetimely does, and much more.
This app is great at both high level stats like a daily profit report, and super granular stats like contribution margin by customer cohort. Definitely a must for apparel shops. I also really like their benchmark analysis, which shows market research stats vs similar stores in your industry.
These are our 5 favorite Shopify apps for apparel stores, but the list doesn't end there. Some other popular app categories are:
- SEO (these apps are especially useful for helping page indexing for your Shopify store)
- E-mail marketing (we use Klaviyo)
- Product reviews (we use Stamped)