The Shopify stores I work with run on eleven apps between them. Shopify's app store lists thousands, and a new owner can install twenty in the first week because each one promises more sales. I keep the list short, and below is what stays in client stores, grouped by the job each app does, with the setup mistake I see most often. Store names stay out.
Getting your products into Google and Meta
Google & YouTube is Google's own free app. It connects the store to Merchant Center, sends your products to Shopping and Performance Max, and sets up conversion tracking for Google Ads. It takes your product titles and main photos as they are, so a hoodie called "Made for Slow Mornings" goes to Google Shopping with that name. In the same app I turn on enhanced conversions and check which actions count as Primary: for a store, only the purchase.
Simprosys manages the product feed. I add it when the store needs Google to see something different from what the shopper sees on the page: a title rewritten as "Men's Fleece Hoodie, Black, Regular Fit", a different main image, or custom labels that split products into campaigns by margin or bestseller status. The store page stays as the owner wrote it.
Facebook & Instagram is Meta's free app. It builds the product catalog for Meta ads and installs the pixel. Without it, Meta can't show a returning visitor the exact product they looked at.
Showing a new visitor that real people buy here
Loox collects reviews with customer photos. I use it for real reviews only. Imported or invented reviews that show up as a star rating invite penalties from Google, and a shopper who spots one stops trusting the rest of the page.
Rep AI puts an assistant in the store chat that answers questions about products, sizes, shipping and returns. It answers from your product pages and policies, so I read those before switching it on. If the returns policy is vague, the assistant repeats the vague version to every customer. I wrote more about that in You're Responsible For What Your Website Says.
Lookfy builds a gallery of looks, usually from Instagram, with the products in each photo tagged and clickable. Clothing stores get the most from it, because a buyer wants to see the hoodie on a person before ordering it.
Bigger orders, and sales you'd lose to an empty shelf
Bundler sells sets at a discount: a hoodie and joggers together, for example. Check every few weeks that the bundle widget still appears on the product page. If the app's own subscription payment fails, the widget disappears from the store and nobody gets a message about it.
Back in Stock adds a "notify me" form to sold-out sizes and colours. In Google Ads I count the submitted form, not the click on the button, and I set it as a Secondary action. That way I can see the demand for a sold-out item while the campaigns keep optimising for purchases.
Production and email
Printful prints and ships each order on demand, so the brand holds no stock. When it creates products in Shopify it fills the product type with its own codes, like "T-SHIRT, DTFILM". I replace those by hand, and the full routine is in Shopify SEO For A New Store.
Klaviyo runs email: the welcome series, abandoned cart, and messages after a purchase. It reads what the customer did in the store, so a person who left a black hoodie in the cart gets an email about the black hoodie.
Getting the numbers out of Shopify
Sheetgo exports orders to Google Sheets on a schedule. I put them next to ad spend in one weekly table, which shows how many orders, at what average value, came in the same week the budget changed. For the ad side I used Adveronix, a Google Sheets add-on, and now I pull the numbers straight from Google Ads. Shopify's own reports show the orders, and ad platforms show the spend. You need the two side by side, and the setup for the Meta side is in Your Own Meta Ads Reports.
What I leave out
I skip apps that repeat something the theme already does, like a second announcement bar or a second size chart. I also skip anything that makes the product page slower. Each app adds its own code to the page, and a shopper on a phone who waits for a review widget, a chat bubble and three pop-ups to load often leaves before seeing the price. After installing anything new, I open a product page on my phone and check how long it takes before I can tap "Add to cart".
More and more stores now replace paid apps with small tools they build themselves with AI. I've done it too: the bundle pop-up in one client store is a section of theme code that an AI assistant wrote, with no app and no monthly fee behind it. A door retailer I work with went further: the size finder where a buyer enters the opening and sees doors that fit, the form where they pick a door's specs, and the two-step quote request in the cart are all built into its theme with AI, without a single app. A custom tool like that loads only what the store needs, so it costs the page less speed than an app built for thousands of stores.
My tip: every app in the store should answer one question: which number does it improve? If there's no answer, remove it. Each extra app slows the site down and adds one more place where something can break.
The two feed apps above decide how your products look in Google Shopping, and I go through the feed itself in Google Merchant Shopify Feed Optimization. If you'd like me to look through the apps in your store and tell you what to keep, book a consultation.
