Our 3 Favorite Bold Shopify Apps to Increase Retail Sales
In 2012, four friends in Canada, working under the name Shappify (think “apps for Shopify”), released their first app: Product Upsell. They had spent months developing it. Finally, on the day they launched, they got one install–and one negative review. (They made a fun video about how that all went down.)
Rather than hang it up, the guys listened to the customer’s feedback and pivoted with a new motto: “To develop nothing but the best products, while also offering the best customer support.” Soon after, in further refining their focus, they changed their name from Shappify to Bold Commerce. Today Product Upsell continues to be a top-seller among Bold Shopify apps, and the company has grown to 200 employees and counting.
Related: Shopify’s Sales-Boosting Launchpad
At Command C, we’re fans of Product Upsell, the app that began it all for Bold. Yet, we also want to bring attention to some equally-amazing, lesser-known, Bold Shopify apps. Today we’ll review Recurring Orders, Bold Brain, and Customer Specific Pricing and show how each of these apps can increase sales for your site.
Recurring Orders: $19.99/month
In the age of retail personalization, the benefits of product subscription services are peerless. Subscriptions allow retailers to deeply understand their customers’ interaction with their products and brand. With the Bold Shopify app, Recurring Orders, any retailer on the platform can set-up a product subscription. What’s more, the app allows shoppers to:
- Buy both subscription items and one-time purchases in the same cart;
- Customize their subscription by schedule or product selection á la Build A Box;
- and log-in to manage the subscription, e.g. skip a delivery, update payment method, etc.
For retailers, they can thoroughly customize the app on the backend. For instance, merchants can offer subscriptions for the whole cart, individual products, or multiple products. They can also change pricing for particular customers. The Recurring Orders app makes it easy for retailers to set up a subscription model and develop consistent, steady sales.
Earlier this year, Bold announced they’ve paired Recurring Orders with another app called Shoelace. Shoelace handles Facebook ad retargeting. As a result, when a customer orders once from a retailer, the retailer can retarget the customer with a subscription offer. For instance, if you run a site for pet supplies, and someone buys dog food, you can follow up and offer the dog owner a bulk discount for subscribing to regular dog food deliveries. The retargeting only goes to people who have purchased from your site. This clever approach can really add to a customer’s average lifetime value for your store.
Bold Brain: FREE
Believe the hype: AI and machine-learning are going to be integral to ecommerce success in the coming years. Bold Commerce launched Bold Brain in 2017, and it proves that they stay on the leading edge of industry trends. With this app, it’s as if you’ve hired a data scientist for your site.
Bold Brain currently works in tandem with the Product Upsell and Recurring Orders. (In time, they plan to implement Bold Brain as a feature within all their apps.) As helpful as Product Upsell has been to retailers, the Bold team saw room for improvement. Before Bold Brain, merchants had to take the time to configure their product upsells. Now Bold Brain automates this process. It’s particularly useful for merchants with 1000s of SKUs.
Here’s how it works: Once you install Bold Brain, the app begins to collect data about customers’ behavior on your site–what products people view together, for instance. From there, the app uses machine learning to see the patterns and create the optimal upsell packages. The retailer can accept the app’s recommendations and make the upsells live with the click of a button. And in Bold’s words, “the longer the app is installed, the smarter it gets.”
On their blog, Bold shares how one of their customers wasn’t seeing strong enough sales conversions with Product Upsell. The retailer simply “
Customer Specific Pricing (Wholesale/VIP): $29.99-$49.99/month
As more B2B companies come online, Customer Specific Pricing by Bold becomes an invaluable tool. (To be clear, it can be used by B2C business, too.)
This Bold Shopify app allows retailers to assign customized and wholesale pricing to individuals. Then when a customer logs into your site, it’s populated with the pricing you’ve assigned. That is the only pricing this customer sees. You can tailor the pricing by product or product category, as in “30% off all shoes” for a wholesale client.
The app also allows merchants to flag customers based on whatever criteria they want, e.g. when someone spends more than $200 on your site or buys 50 pairs of shoes.
Additionally, retailers can hide any products from a customer’s view. In the B2C or B2B space, this is useful when merchants what to create “membership” programs with special pricing. For instance, once I become a member, I gain access to a wider selection of inventory available at the membership rate. The Bold app also lets retailers set up a “Welcome to the Club” email to automatically send to people who sign up to become members. Again, as an example. It is wholly customizable.
This Bold Shopify app has over 500 5-star customer reviews. Not only do customers write things like, “We love this app, could not do what we do without it!,” they also repeatedly applaud Bold’s customer service and support. By the looks of it, Bold’s motto to offer the best customer support rings true.
In Conclusion
We asked Jay Myers, one of the four founding friends at Bold, what trends he sees coming up for ecommerce. He replied, “One big thing we’re seeing is merchants starting to expect apps to essentially be mini platforms themselves. So a current focus of ours is making our apps very “Partner Friendly” with robust API’s and key points of integration for other apps. Not just so others don’t conflict with them, but so they actually work *better* together!
A good example is the recent integration between our Bold Subscriptions app & Shoelace [noted above]. Two great apps on their own, but together they can do so much more! This is something we’re focusing a lot on. As the ecosystem grows in general, I expect we’ll see much more of this as well.”
At Command C, we also expect to see more of Bold for years to come. In working with our clients, we take a comprehensive approach to solving their technical issues. We’d never add an app just for the sake of adding an app. We use Bold Shopify apps like a scalpel in precision surgery. And they deliver the remedy.