Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) falls on November 29th to December 2nd this year.
During the span of these 4 days, online sellers of all sizes have the opportunity to be part of one of the biggest sales events of the year. In fact, Shopify merchants collectively generated over $1.5 billion in sales over BFCM weekend last year.
If you're planning to go all out with your BFCM campaign this year, here's a roundup of some of the best Shopify apps to help you sell more this holiday shopping season and beyond.
Sign up for our 3-part BFCM workshop series
From November 6th to November 20th, we'll be hosting an online workshop and live Q&A each week to help you plan for a profitable Black Friday Cyber Monday.
Save your seat1. Bold Discounts: An easier way to manage a storewide sale
Price: $14/month
Part of the appeal of BFCM is the promise of deals you don't get any other time of year. If you plan on putting a lot of your products on sale at once, you may need an app for managing these discounts storewide.
Bold Discounts makes it easy to set up a variety of sales without discount codes, and even schedule them to go live during a specific time. It also comes with tools to highlight on-sale items for customers and prevent abuse through stacking multiple offers.
Why Bold Discounts?
- Create and schedule sales without generating discount codes, automatically adjusting the "compare at price" accordingly
- Display a countdown timer to show shoppers that your sale is only here for a limited time
- Save time by putting all, some collections, or specific products on sale at once
2. Privy: Build your email list with pop-up offers
Price: Starting at $0/month (up to 5000 pageviews a month)
Privy lets you easily add pop-ups to your store, customize their look, and even set when and where they "pop up" so you don't overwhelm visitors.
Privy doesn't just offer the traditional exit-intent pop-up, but also fly-outs, spin-to-wins, and more. With these pop-ups, you can present visitors who are about to leave your store without making a purchase an enticing offer in exchange for their email.
This way, even if a prospective customer isn't ready to buy on the spot, you can continue to market to them in the future via email.
Why Privy?
- Triggers include exit intent, scroll-based, time on site, cart abandonment and more. This helps you avoid a spammy user experience by only delivering them when customers are the most engaged (e.g. when someone abandons their cart)
- Integrates with other Shopify apps like Klaviyo, Bronto, and more
- Built-in offers/discounts that users only get when they opt-in will help you capture more emails than ever before
3. Referral Candy: Turn new customers into more customers
Price: Starting at $49/month
If you execute a breakthrough BFCM campaign, you're bound to have a lot of new customers.
But what's better than new customers? More new customers.
Referral Candy lets you offer referral-based discounts to tap into the personal networks (friends, family, co-workers) of your customers.
This incentive turns your customers into advocates that will help you sell more because there's something in it for both them and the person they refer.
Why Referral Candy?
- One of the easiest ways to set up and run a referral program on Shopify
- Integrates with ReCharge, Recurring Orders, Bold, and more
- Referral tracking and rewards distribution are automatically handled by the app
4. Back In Stock: "Sold out" doesn't mean "stop selling"
Price: Starting at $0/month (up to 5 email notifications)
"Sold out" might sound like a good thing, but it's unfortunate for the customers who really wanted one of your products.
You can let them leave empty-handed, or you can let them opt-in to get notified when you have more inventory in stock.
Back In Stock adds a tab next to sold-out products that visitors can click to get notified when they can revisit your site to buy the item they wanted. If you plan to restock over the course of BFCM weekend, you can notify those lost customers, especially if you paid to acquire them.
With this app, you get to build your email list and bring prospective customers back to your store at the same time.
Why Back In Stock?
- Understand what products have the most demand, even if they're not available for purchase (a great way to validate product ideas)
- Sold out items become an opportunity to generate new leads
- Integrates with Campaign Monitor, Klaviyo, and Constant Contact, and more
5. Recom.ai: Increase your average order value
Price: Starting at $0/month (until it drives $100 in sales)
Getting more customers isn't the only way to increase your revenue—you can achieve better profits by encouraging each customer to buy more.
Upselling and cross-selling lets you increase your average order value by presenting customers with the option to buy complementary products or "upgrade" their order in some way (e.g. offering a belt to go with a purchase of pants).
Recom.ai is an app for surfacing the right upsell and cross-sell offer at the right time and in the right place—during the checkout process, or on nearly any page of your store.
Why Recom.ai?
- Detailed rules let you set up smart triggers to sell complementary products together
- Their support team is available to help you get it up and running on your store
- You won't be charged until it drives 5x your plan's price in the monthly sales it generates
6. Sales Pop Master: Show off your sales in real-time
Price: Starting at $0/month
Sales Pop Master offers a suite of tools for surfacing social proof that establishes your brand’s trustworthiness. Features include real-time pop-up notifications of your sales, a countdown timer for limited time offers, a stock countdown and more—all of which can be added to product pages or checkout.
Sales Pop Master’s tools help to create a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) by offering social proof of the popularity of your brand and by creating a sense of urgency that the offer won't last forever.
If you’re planning for a high volume of traffic in a short period of time (like during BFCM), Sales Pop Master can improve the likelihood of a new customer making a purchase.
Why Sales Pop Master?
- Customize user-facing notifications to appear in real-time or, for newer stores, as part of a loop of recent orders
- Increase urgency on product pages with a countdown and stock timers—perfect for running limited-time offers
- Build trust by giving users a “sneak peek” at the activity on your store
7. Spently: Supercharge your store emails
Price: Starting at $0/month (up to 50 orders)
Email is one of the most effective channels for Shopify merchants during BFCM (according to our data from last year). Your customers will undoubtedly be wading through a flood of BFCM emails from all their favorite brands, so making yours stand out is crucial to attracting shoppers. Supercharged Store Emails by Spently was made to do just that.
Spently includes a ton of customizable email templates for creating unique, professional emails. With features like personalized product recommendations, referral codes, and discount codes, Spently quickly and seamlessly integrates with your Shopify store.
Why Spently?
- Drive sales with product recommendations based on past purchases and upsell existing customers with email marketing
- Incentivize loyal customers to spread awareness of your brand and make a BFCM purchase through referrals and unique discount codes
- Add social media widgets to your marketing emails to increase engagement across all major social media platforms
8. Google Ads & Google Shopping: Retarget likely buyers
Price: Starting at $0/month
Google Ads is one of the most robust advertising platforms available to small businesses. Through machine learning, Google has become one of the most effective tools for identifying and targeting customers with the intent to buy your products.
With the Google Ads & Google Shopping app, you’ll be able to use Google’s tools to their fullest extent. Easily sync the app with your Shopify store and in a matter of minutes, you’ll be able to launch ads on the Google Ads network, directly from Shopify.
The Shopify app store also includes other marketing apps that work within Shopify. Easily sync your store with marketing tools for Facebook, the Microsoft Search Network, email, and more.
Why Google Ads & Google Shopping?
- Run advanced Google Ads campaigns without advanced knowledge in an easy-to-use, step-by-step process
- Streamline your Google Shopping listings and Google Ads from the convenience of a single interface
- Recover missed sales by using Google’s advanced algorithm to create effective retargeting campaigns
Get Google Ads & Google Shopping
Hire Kit for an extra hand this BFCM!
Kit helps thousands of Shopify store owners market their online stores. Chat with Kit to handle tasks like Facebook and Instagram advertising, email marketing, and more.
Hire Kit free9. Re:amaze: Manage all your support conversations in one place
Price: Starting at $20/month
Bad customer service can tarnish your brand. Good customer service can redeem it. How you handle customer complaints and the ease with which your customers find support is often a defining moment in a customer’s relationship with your brand.
In order to keep up with customer service requests without compromising quality, you might consider Re:amaze. Re:amaze is a live chat and customer support tool that helps you manage many customer conversations across multiple channels in a single place and in a shorter amount of time.
With Re:amaze, you’ll be able to add live chatbots to your store quickly and easily, engage with customers and boost repeat purchases. Re:amaze’s intelligent chatbots are able to detect and answer common customer inquiries and provide accurate and fast information, freeing up your time for more pressing matters.
Why Re:amaze?
- Add live chat to help engage your customers, answer common inquiries and help to lighten the load of support work
- Manage your support tickets easily in one place for all support inquiries. Use a shared inbox to handle queries from email, live chat, chatbots, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SMS, VOIP
- Create orders, process returns and issue refunds from directly within the Re:amaze app quickly and easily
10. Shoelace: Create retargeting journeys
Price: Starting at $249/month (free to install)
There’s a million things that could stop a customer from making a purchase on your store. From a knock at the door to a notification on their phone, there’s no way to stop distractions from getting in the way. But what if you had a second chance?
Visitor behavior can tell us a lot about the likeliness of a customer making a purchase. Between the frequency of visits, past purchases, pages viewed, and a host of other behaviors, you can separate out those visitors who are more likely to purchase certain products and retarget them with ads.
While retargeting may be effective, it can also be very complex. Shoelace aims to simplify the process.
Shoelace is a customer retargeting app that allows you to set up “triggers” that engage your customers with relevant content automatically. The Shoelace app gives merchants complete control over the journey towards brand loyalty—from first-purchaser to long-time customer.
Why Shoelace?
- Create retargeting ads triggered by specific customer behavior, providing a personalized, valuable interaction with your brand
- Create event sequences to standardize the customer journey and show the right customers the right ads at the right time
- Target specific segments of your audience to engage with your most high-volume customers
11. Ultimate Sales Boost
Price: Starting at $0/month
Every decision a customer makes on your store will come down to a complex sequence of split-second judgments.
But what if there was a way to make those decisions easier and in your favor? Certain features of an online store have been shown to provide a more optimal, easy experience for customers that results in more purchases. This is where Ultimate Sales Boost comes in.
Ultimate Sales Boost is a suite of tools designed to optimize your product pages, collection pages, home-page and checkout. Ultimate Sales Boost includes easy-to-customize promotional widgets, countdown timers, upsell widgets, trust badges and more. Everything you need to create a high-converting sales experience.
Why Ultimate Sales Boost?
- Add low stock counters and countdown timers to create a sense of urgency and scarcity to encourage purchases
- Display trust badges and precise “get it by” dates for your customer to build a sense of trust and ease throughout the transaction
- Use features on your homepage, collection pages, product pages, and your cart page to create an optimal “checkout flow”
A note on scarcity and urgency apps: With the right product and customer, scarcity can work really well. However, creating false scarcity or trying to trick people can turn off customers and hurt your brand. The scarcity you create should be based on something like a limited-time offer or a limited supply of inventory.
Get your store ready for a breakthrough BFCM
These apps are great all year round, but they're especially powerful during high-traffic events such as BFCM.
If you plan on participating in Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you should start preparing your campaigns sooner rather than later.
What products will you push? Which channels will you use to get the word out? How will you get as much value as you can out of your efforts?
There's a lot to consider in order to make your BFCM weekend a success.
Are you ready for it?
Get more tools and resources to help make your Black Friday Cyber Monday a success—Check out our BFCM Toolbox.
Thank you to Evan Ferguson for helping to update this roundup.