My e-commerce business has been running on Shopify for a good few years now. It’s a fantastic platform, but it doesn’t do everything we need straight out of the box.

Here are five services that are worth every penny if you want to streamline your operation, free up your time, or provide a better service to your customers.

None of the links I provide here are affiliate links. I have no connection to these companies whatsoever, apart from being a satisfied customer, of course. Prices are correct at the time of writing this and are meant as an indication only.

Without further ado, here is the list (in no particular order).

1. Shipstation (from $20/month)

I can’t imagine our business without Shipstation. Connect your courier accounts, connect your Shopify store, and you’re good to go.

The real power is in the automation. Shipstation allows you to create all kinds of shipping rules, depending on what’s in the order or where it’s going (among many other things). It’ll create picking lists and shipping labels for you, and even send bespoke emails to your customers.

Shipstation helps us to process all our orders within minutes, and it never puts a foot wrong.

Find out more here.

2. Parcelify ($14.99/month)

Shipstation depends on getting good information from your store, and although Shopify has some shipping customisation built in, it’s not going to be enough for most businesses. Parcelify is a neat little app that serves shipping options to your customer whilst they’re inside your store (before they check out).

Crucially, these options can be configured based on their postal code (among other things) which allows you to restrict certain products to certain geographical areas easily and reliably. It takes a few hours to get set up, but we’ve used this app for years, and it’s been an absolute peach.

Find out more here.

3. Locksmith App (from $9/month)

Locksmith allows us to hide specific products, collections, or pages on our store.

You can grant customers access to these otherwise hidden areas in a variety of ways. You can give them a password, or send them a ‘magic link’. The app can even check if the customer is on your email list, or if you assigned them a tag within Shopify. These are just a few examples, the list of ways people can access your secret URLs is long.

The app is well-designed, easy to use and allows you to easily create private areas on your site (maybe for wholesale customers) or access to exclusive products.

Find out more here.

4. Re-Amaze (from $29/month)

Bring all your customer service channels together in one place. Social Media, email, on-site chat support and wherever else your customers like to talk to you. This platform saves us so much time. The software is smart too and will suggest support articles intelligently. You can create chatbots to guide your customer through the buying experience, or make product recommendations based on their answers to questions.

Response templates help save us a tonne of time, and the software manages to deliver the right balance of personalised service and time efficient support.

Find out more here.

5. SEO Manager ($20/month)

Not exciting this one, but unless you are super skilled in SEO, this app really helps you to keep on top of the basics. I’d say it’s worthwhile purely for its ability to monitor for and sort out broken links, but it does a lot more than that. We use it to identify keywords and ensure that we rank for them in Google.

Find out more here.

These apps and platforms easily pay for themselves, most of them many times over. As your store grows, it’s important to find tools that can save you and your team precious time so that you can focus on what’s important.

How about you? Have you found any software solutions that have helped your business to level up?