The 13 Best Shopify Apps for Dropshipping 2021 (Free & Paid)

Face it: when you’re just beginning with dropshipping, your budget might be tight. That’s why you probably can’t afford to spend money on the wrong Shopify apps. Keep reading and you will find out what the 13 best Shopify apps are for when you’re just beginning with dropshipping. I will give you a free option and a paid option with each app.

The list of the 13 best Shopify apps for dropshipping beginners

Let’s begin with the best Shopify apps to have for your dropshipping store when you’re just beginning. Of course, these apps are also awesome if you have already started your dropshipping store!

I will give you a free option and a paid option with most of these apps below.

I highly suggest you start with the free Shopify app options when you’re just beginning with dropshipping.

This way you will have the best free apps first, and then after you get some sales or when your budget allows it, you could add more paid apps.

These paid apps could help you get more sales or help you in other areas, such as increasing the average order value!

Also, if you have a paid Shopify theme, then take a look to see if your theme already has that feature available for you. Some themes, like the Booster Theme, has a lot of these apps below included inside the theme already.

But don’t worry, you don’t need a paid theme when you’re just beginning with dropshipping. I just wanted to be clear that if you do have a theme that includes one or more of these features, then you obviously don’t need a Shopify app for that!

One more thing before I begin, I will also add a link to a related article of mine if you want to learn more about the topic that the Shopify app helps you with.

1. Processing dropshipping orders

To start off this list, you need to have an app that processes your dropshipping orders.

You can do this without any app, but ask yourself if you would want to manually enter your customer’s information each time you get a new order.

There are apps out there that will help you automate most of this. You can press the order bottom, and then the app will automatically fill in all the information from your customer.

The only thing then left for you to do is to press on ‘Pay’, and even that can be automated later on if you want to!

I will split it below into two sections. One is if you’re currently dropshipping with AliExpress, and the other one is if you’re not. If you’re not sure about this yet, then you can click here.

Are you dropshipping with AliExpress?

If you’re currently dropshipping with AliExpress, or if you want to do that, then I recommend the Shopify apps below.

The best free Shopify app for this

The free Shopify app that most people start with is Oberlo. Oberlo helps you connect your Shopify store to AliExpress.

Oberlo is free to use, and it doesn’t matter how many orders you have per month! Before, you could only have 50 orders maximum per month, and then you had to switch to a paid plan:

I won’t give multiple suggestions everywhere, but I just had to mention DSers here. They have a great free plan as well, and their main selling point is that they are ‘Faster than Faster’.

This means that you can order your dropshipping orders way faster. They do this by offering you the option to place bulk orders. No more ordering one order at a time!

Plus, they are an official AliExpress partner.

If you’re interested in learning more about DSers, then you can read this here.

The best paid Shopify app for this

If you’re dropshipping with AliExpress, then Dropified is a great choice if you’re looking for a paid Shopify app.

But, as you can see above, Oberlo also has a paid plan as well. There are a lot of comparison guides between these two apps online, for example:

• Oberlo vs Dropified: Which Is Better for Your Business? by Oberlo
• Oberlo vs Dropified: Trying to choose between Oberlo vs Dropified? by Dropified
• Dropified vs Oberlo: The Battle of The Dropshipping Plugins by ecommerce Platforms

The thing is, these apps are almost the same, and it will come down to personal preference. That’s why it’s great that Oberlo has a free version available and Dropified a 14 days free trial.

Plus, don’t forget to compare their pricing so you can see which one fits with your current budget:

Are you dropshipping without AliExpress?

If you don’t want to start / continue dropshipping with AliExpress, then I have some great alternatives for you in the article I linked to below:

15 Alternatives to Dropshipping With AliExpress in 2021!

In that article, I will also explain how to connect your Shopify store to your dropshipping supplier. Plus, some of these AliExpress alternatives have their own app like Oberlo to easily process your orders!

2. Sales notifications (social proof)

A great way to boost the trust of your visitors is to have sales notifications popping up. These notifications have, for example, information about past sales on them.

The theory behind these apps is that your visitors will have more trust in your store if they see that other people are purchasing your products. For example:

Some apps even allow you to have “fake past orders.” This way, you can still use the app even if you didn’t have any sales yet. (I suggest you read this if you want to do that.)

Although, before you decide to use sales notifications, you need to decide if you like it or not. Some people find it quite annoying when stuff keeps popping up on their screen.

If you really don’t know if you should add it to your store or not, you could always split test and see if people are staying longer on your store with or without these notifications.

The best free Shopify app for this

The best free Shopify app for this is Sales pop by Beeketing. This is the app that most people use on their dropshipping store.

I do have a big tip for you: If you don’t want the ‘By Beeketing’ trademark anymore, then simply go to this question on their site and see their answer!

The best paid Shopify app for this

In case you want more options with the notifications, I suggest taking a look at ProveSource.

If you’re interested in learning more about ProveSource, I suggest watching this short video about them:

The current price of ProveSource starts at $21 per month, but they do have a free account option available:

If you’re interested now in ProveSource, you can use PS60-STUDENTS as a discount code to get 60% off for your first month!

3. Countdown timer (urgency)

If you want to create a sense of urgency for your visitors, having a countdown timer on your product description is great. For example:

In case you don’t know if you should use urgency, then Core DNA has got you covered:

There is nothing that kills ecommerce conversion rates faster than customer hesitation. Anytime a customer thinks “maybe later”, you open the window to a sale-killing distraction – an offer from a competitor, a phone notification, or even a change of heart.

There is one way to get shoppers to take action immediately: urgency.

Core dna

The best free Shopify app for this

The best free Shopify app option for this is again an app from Beeketing.

As I said above, don’t forget that you can get the watermark removed.

The best paid Shopify app for this

In case you want to do way more with your countdown timer, I suggest taking a look at the app called Hurrify.

You will have way more options on what kind of campaign you want to hold and what kind of design you want!

The price of Hurrify is currently $6.99 per month.

4. Currency converter

This is a must-have if you plan on selling in multiple countries. Selling in multiple countries means having visitors that are used to different currencies.

You don’t want to lose these potential new customers, right?

Well, what do you think happens if they go off your site and try to calculate the price in their home currency?

Yes, indeed – there is a high chance that they may never return.

Maybe they got distracted, or maybe they can’t find your store again once they’ve made a decision to purchase.

There are a lot of things that could happen when you let your visitors calculate the prices in their home currency by themself.

So, what can you do?

You need to have a currency converter on your dropshipping store. This way, the price of the products will automatically be displayed in the local currency of the visitor!

For example, as you can see in the images below, you can select USD and EUR (and other currencies). They will then show the price in that currency!

Two things with this example:

• When I was on the site, they didn’t automatically change the currency to EUR. I needed to do it manually. Which is, of course, an option that you could do in your store as well. If you want to!
• The rounding is a bit weird. You can see the Euro price is rounded at .52; this looks a bit weird, don’t you think?

The best free Shopify app for this

The best free currency converter Shopify app is Bold Multi-Currency.

The great thing about this app is that you can add rounding rules. For example, this way it would say $4.60 instead of $4.56.

That’s, of course, an option to use. You can also just leave the price without any rounding if you prefer that!

The only downside is that you need to add the currencies yourself, plus you need to add rounding rules for every currency that you add.

The nice thing is that it will automatically detect your customer’s location, and then it will show your prices in their local currency (if you have added that currency, as I said above).

The best paid Shopify app for this

The best paid Shopify currency converter app is this one here.

This app has everything that you want from a currency converter. Just take a look at their app in the Shopify app store. You will see all the features that you will get!

If you’re interested in learning more about their app, I suggest watching their video below:

If you want all the features, then it’s currently $9.95 per month.

And yes, they do have a free option as well, but the reason I didn’t select that as the best free app is that it won’t automatically convert the price to the visitor’s local currency. It will only do that with the paid version of the app!

Plus, you can only add up to five currencies with their free version.

5. Reviews (social proof)

Another great way to increase the trust your new visitors have with you is to have reviews from past customers displayed on your dropshipping store.

These reviews can be displayed on your product pages. For example:

Or they can be used as a big review page with all the reviews from all the products you have. You can learn more about having a review page here. That article also contains a lot of examples. Like this one:

Having reviews is great, but having reviews with pictures is even better! Definitely if these pictures have your customer with the product displayed in it.

That builds way more trust than having nothing or having just a few lines with something like “this is a great product.”

Reviews when you’re just beginning with dropshipping

But what if you’re just beginning and you still want reviews on your dropshipping store?

If you decided that you want customer reviews on your product pages and you’re just beginning, then I’ve got some awesome options for you here.

The best free Shopify app for this

If you’re just beginning, you probably won’t have that many customers yet.

That’s why having a paid review app is not that important yet because you will not have that many past customers that you can ask for reviews.

The best free Shopify review app is the Product Reviews app from Shopify.

This app has everything for you if you want to start accepting reviews on your dropshipping store.

The only downside is that you can’t have pictures in these reviews.

Bonus tip: If you want to import reviews from AliExpress but don’t want to pay for a paid Shopify app yet, you can try an app like this one. This way, you can import the reviews from AliExpress so you can then import them to your review app.

The best paid Shopify app for this

You need to make this decision yourself because of the different designs and options each review app has.

I will give you a few app options below. If you don’t know which one to choose, you could always opt-in for the trials and see what looks the best on your dropshipping store!

1. Loox

The first best paid Shopify review app is Loox.

You already saw this app above in the review page example from Notebook Therapy.

Yes, that’s made with Loox.

Also, if you want to, you can import reviews from AliExpress with Loox:

The price of Loox starts at $9.99 per month. This gives you 100 monthly review request emails. Plus, you will have an extended trial of 30-days if you signup through my link here.

2. Ali Reviews

If you’re dropshipping with AliExpress and you want to import product reviews from AliExpress, then Ali Reviews is a great Shopify app for you.

The price starts at $9.90 per month, which probably has enough features for you. At first, they also had a free version available with a logo of them, but they recently updated and removed that option. Now it’s only paid!

These were, in my opinion, the best two paid Shopify review apps, but if you want to see more options then I suggest going to the Shopify app store and typing ‘Product Reviews’.

6. FAQ page

Guess what most customers that contact you have in common?

They have questions!

So, what you can do is create a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page on your store. You will answer the most important questions on this page, like how long order processing takes. (You can click here if you want to learn what kind of questions you can answer in an FAQ page.)

This could also save you in customer service time in the near future.

The best free Shopify app option

A great free app to build an FAQ page on your dropshipping store is HelpCenter.

You can learn more about HelpCenter in the video below:

The best paid Shopify app option

If you’re looking at something with way more features for your customer service, take a look at the apps below. I will also show you a dropshipping store that currently uses that app so that you can see an example!

1. Zendesk

The first one you can look at is Zendesk. You can see it in action on the dropshipping store Treasure Fan:

You can learn more about this dropshipping store here.

2. HelpDocs

And the second one is called HelpDocs. You can see it in action on the dropshipping store Inspire Uplift:

You can learn more about this dropshipping store here.

7. Fewer people asking where their order is

The next Shopify app will be awesome for people who get a lot of emails from customers asking them where their order is.

The solution? Simple. Keep your customers engaged throughout the whole delivery process.

The Shopify app that I suggest you use for this is called AfterShip.

They will keep your customers engaged while their order is on the way. For example, this is what it will look like without using AfterShip:

And here you can see how much that changes once you integrate AfterShip on your dropshipping store:

Do you see how many more updates your customers get after using AfterShip?

Another great thing that you can do with AfterShip is you can create a branded tracking page. Just take a look at the image below so you know what I mean:

You can click here to see a demo of the tracking page.

The current price of AfterShip depends on how many trackings you will do per month, but the great thing is that they offer a free trial of 14 days, and they have a free account option:

You can click here to see their current pricing.

8. Email marketing

Did you know that every $1 spent on email marketing earns $38? That’s the biggest ROI among marketing channels so far. (Source)

That’s why email marketing is something you should definitely try to implement into your dropshipping business.

If you’re completely new to email marketing and are not sure how to use it for your store, then I suggest reading this complete beginner’s guide first.

The problem is that there are a lot of email marketing Shopify apps and services.

And even one popular email marketing service, Mailchimp, decided to stop supporting the integration with Shopify.

So, which email marketing service should you choose for your dropshipping store in 2021?

Well, if you’re just beginning, then I suggest taking a look at Klaviyo.

There’s a lot to cover, so if you’re interested in learning more about Klaviyo, then I suggest reading our other article here.

That article also covers seven other email marketing service providers, so you can pick the right company for your dropshipping store!

9. SMS marketing

Now that you know how important email marketing is, it’s time to move on to SMS marketing.

You might be thinking now, “Why would I need that?”

Well, for example, if you see that a lot of people are abandoning their cart, but with a telephone number instead of an email address, then having an app that helps you contact these visitors is great!

Plus, did you know that SMS has a 98% open rate, a 45% reply rate, and a 6-8x higher engagement rate than email marketing? (Source)

The Shopify app that I suggest you use for this is called Cartloop.

Here’s a simple explanation of how Cartloop will work for your dropshipping store:

1. When a shopper abandons their cart, they will get sent to Cartloop.
2. Cartloop will personally follow up with the shopper that abandoned their cart on your store by sending them a personalized SMS.
3. Now you just wait and let them recover your abandoned carts!

To make it even more clear for you, here are three examples of how real conversations look:

The best part? Risk-free pricing. The pricing of Cartloop currently starts at $0. You only pay when you profit. (Plus, you don’t have to pay for each SMS that they send.)

10. GDPR compliance

If you need to be compliant with GDPR, then Easy GDPR is a great, free Shopify app for that!

11. Trust badges

Trust badges are there to increase the trust your store visitors have in your store. There are people that will abandon their cart if they have security concerns.

Adding trust badges is one of the easiest ways to increase trust and even conversion rates for your dropshipping store in 2021!

The best free Shopify app option

If you’re interested in learning how to add trust badges for free to your dropshipping Shopify store, I suggest reading the article I’ve linked below:

How to Add Trust Badges to Your Shopify Store in 2021?

I will cover how to add trust badges on your product descriptions, cart page, and on your checkout page!

The best paid Shopify app option

If you do want a paid Shopify app for this, you can take a look at the Shopify app from TrustedSite.

If you’re interested in learning more about TrustedSite, I suggest watching their video below:

The price is free for up to 500 visits per month, and after that, you need to pay based on the traffic you’re getting.

You do need to see if this is worth it for you or not because currently their pricing starts at $39 per month, and that’s when you get no more than 2000 monthly visitors to your store.

12. Mobile ready

You know what they say, make your store ready for mobile visitors. Plus, even Google is now indexing mobile-first. (Source)

You will see that a lot of your visitors are on their mobile. For example, it is predicted that in 2021, 53.9% of the sales will come from mobile:

The best thing, of course, is to pick a Shopify theme that is mobile responsive.

The second option that you have to be ready for these mobile visitors is to install the Mobile Converter app from Beeketing.

The Mobile Converter has a lot of great features that help you be “mobile-ready.” Some of these features are:

• Sticky Add to Cart bar. Set a fixed call-to-action bar on the top or bottom of the mobile screen while your customers are scrolling up or down on the product pages.
• Mobile Gallery. Display your product images in a full-screen view with a sticky Add-to-cart button.

Of course, you don’t need this app if your theme already has these features available for you! Just keep in mind that you don’t need a paid theme when you’re just beginning.

13. SEO (free traffic)

You probably already know some ways to get free traffic to your dropshipping store, but in case you don’t, or if you want to learn more ways, then I suggest reading my article here to learn how to get free traffic!

Just keep in mind that SEO optimization isn’t as simple as installing an app and calling it a day. You can do way more, but an app that can help you a bit further with various SEO things on a Shopify store is Plug in SEO.

This app will help you find problems that your Shopify store might have. These problems could decrease your search engine rankings if you don’t fix them. Or you could rank even higher when you address these problems!

Most features are free to use, but they do have a $20 per month paid plan with extra features and premium support.

Getting started with dropshipping in 2021

So, are you ready to get started with dropshipping? Or maybe you have already started, but you’re looking to get some inspiration?

If so, I suggest reading my complete Shopify dropshipping guide!

It’s a huge article, but it contains everything that you need to know to create your own Shopify dropshipping store in 2021. It’s like a dropshipping course, but for free!

Reading this article will help you to get started and stay motivated while beginning and continuing your dropshipping journey!

Just don’t forget that success takes time. Keep improving each and every day!

Shopify Dropshipping Complete Guide 2021: Create Your Store!

Here are some of my best articles:

• AliExpress Dropshipping Complete Guide for Beginners! (2021)
• The Complete Guide: Can You Start Dropshipping Without Money in 2021?
• 12 Reasons Why Most People Fail With Dropshipping in 2021 | Beat Them!
• 23 Awesome Shopify Dropshipping Store Examples

Also, if you don’t have a Shopify store yet then you can click here to get a free 14-day trial!

Best Shopify dropshipping apps: Conclusion

So there you have it, the 13 best Shopify apps for when you’re just beginning with dropshipping in 2021!

Although most apps do have cool paid versions of it, I still suggest you stick mostly with the free Shopify apps at the beginning of your dropshipping adventure.

Then the moment your sales are increasing and you’re ready to increase your conversion rates or your average order value, it’s time to get some paid Shopify apps.

And if you’re going to get paid Shopify apps, I suggest taking a look at the Vitals app.

If you subscribe to the Vitals app, you will get access to 40+ commonly used apps. For example, reviews, sales notifications, trust badges and more! The great thing about the app is that all these different apps won’t be loaded if you don’t want to use them.

You can read this article here that they wrote to learn more about why having multiple Shopify apps activated will slow down your store.

If you’re interested, you can use my link here to get a 45-day free trial instead of the normal 30-days!

If you have any suggestions for the apps currently on the list or if you have an app that you think must be on this list, comment below or contact me directly by pressing the “Contact Us” button at the top!