If you’re running an eCommerce business, there’s a lot of resources at your disposal that you may not know about. Top among them are 26 free Shopify tools!
These free, easy to use tools, which are helpful whether you use Shopify or not, have been key to Shopify’s success as an eCommerce platform. While many of these tools make it simpler for you to run your Shopify business, others are useful because of how they help conversions or can fit into your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
Today, we’re going to break down what each tool does, provide some use cases for SEO and driving conversions, and take a deeper dive into why giving tools away for free is a winning strategy. We’ll be doing our best to update this post whenever there’s a new Shopify tool too.
26 Free Shopify Tools
Photo Courtesy of #WoCinTech Chat
Here’s everything Shopify offers for free right now.
- Hatchful: Hatchful lets you quickly create a logo using hundreds of templates, icons, and color combinations. You can also download high-quality images and branding packages for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Youtube.
- Business Name Generator: Describe your brand in one word, and you’ll get 100 business name suggestions!
- Slogan Maker: Describe your brand in one word and get over 1,000 slogan ideas!
- Online Video Maker: Now you can make simple videos quickly thanks to Shopify’s video builder. Just choose a template, add images, and add promo text! And here are six ways video can help you reach more people on social media from Jon Clark, managing partner at Moving Traffic Media.
- Pay Stub Generator: Save time and money by creating free pay stubs that include all company, employee, income, and deduction information. You’ll be emailed a pay stub once you complete the form, and you can use it right away.
- QR Code Generator: Enter your URL, phone number, SMS, or text content and get a QR code you can use in print, online, or email.
- Terms and Conditions Generator: Shopify will populate their simple terms and conditions template with your company’s info.
- Business Card Maker: Populate Shopify’s business card template with your details and logo, and you’ll get a card you can print right away.
- Gift Certificate Template: Fill out your info, add your logo, and enter your gift certificate; that’s how easy it is to make a printable gift certificate.
- Invoice Generator: Enter your company’s information, upload your logo, and add all the customer and invoice information. You’ll be left with an itemized invoice you can send, print, or save right away.
- Purchase Order Template: With these easy to create incoming and pending order forms, you can manage outstanding orders and accounts payable for your business.
- Privacy Policy Generator: Updated to accommodate the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), this privacy policy template takes all the headache of ensuring your business is legally compliant and encourages customer trust.
- Shipping Label Template: Fill out Shopify’s template, and you’ll have a label you can print on sticker paper and use right away!
- Refund Policy Generator: This template will create a refund policy in an instant.
- Bill of Lading (BoL) Template: A BoL is a document that acknowledges that a carrier has received a shipment. It’s a document of title, a receipt for shipped goods, and a contract between a carrier and shipper.
- Barcode Generator: Provide your email and the text or info you want to go along with your barcode, and you’ll get a new barcode you can save and print.
- Image Resizer: Save yourself time by effortlessly resizing upwards of six images using a drag and drop interface or by uploading.
- Business Loan Calculator: Find out how much a loan will cost you with this easy to use calculator.
- CPM Calculator: Find out your cost per thousand impressions (CPM), which is the amount you’ll pay if your ad is seen 1,000 times. The results are delivered to your email.
- Profit Margin Calculator: Use this calculator to inform how you set your prices.
- Exchange Marketplace: Exchange is a marketplace where you can buy or sell a pre-existing business. Uneditable, verified Shopify data, owner-reported data, and market trends are used to suggest a valuation price, although a seller can use whatever price they like and negotiate from there. You will be charged no additional fee for buying a business.
- Discount Calculator: Calculate the savings for the following types of discounts:
- Discount Off One Item
- Fixed Amount Off
- 2 For 1 Discount
- Storefront Sign Maker: Choose from four designs that display several lines of text and a QR code and directions on how to scan it. Then download your sign as a PDF.
- Oberlo: Oberlo lets you find products to sell using your store. You can add the products and start selling them immediately. If you order your products from Oberlo, you won’t personally have to package or ship anything, and you won’t be responsible for storage either; Oberlo will take care of that for you.
- Compass: Compass is Shopify’s learning resource center. You can get free video courses from over 90 verified instructors offering courses in topics ranging from goal setting to product photography! You also get access to:
- Live-streamed webinars
- Tutorials
- Case Studies
- Articles
- A community with over 700,000 members
- Q&As with experts
- A Help Center
- Burst: Burst is your destination for free, high-resolution images. You can also contribute images of your own.
Use Cases
Photo Courtesy of The Gender Spectrum Collection
Here’s how you can apply these tools to improve your SEO and help convert browsers to buyers.
Refund Policies
If you’re guessing what gets people to buy things, a refund policy may not leap out at you like price and quality. But the key to converting someone is thinking about the purchase process from the buyer’s point of view.
For many people, return policies are critical, making the clarity provided by Shopify’s Refund Policy Generator key. You should revisit your return policy if it has too many rules because that can put customers off.
Visual Trustworthiness
A small business isn’t only competing based on price and quality; they’re also competing based on trustworthiness. If you’re deciding whether to give your personal information to someone, who are you more likely to choose: an established brand you already know or a new store to you without a big reputation?
One way to quickly establish trust is with visible markers of trustworthiness, and thanks to Shopify’s Privacy Policy Generator and Terms And Conditions Generator, you can look professional quickly. Small, clearly visible icons depicting accepted forms of payment and security networks are also indispensable.
Coupon Codes, Gift Certificates, & Black Friday
You may be surprised to learn that businesses don’t often rank as number one for their own brand’s coupon codes. The solution is simple: make a page all about your coupon codes and then give one away.
This is where Shopify’s Gift Gift Certificate Template comes in handy. Your page should be as rich with information as possible, including answering questions about how coupon codes relate to gift certificates:
- Can you use a coupon code at the same time as a gift certificate?
- Can you use a coupon code when buying the gift certificate?
- How can I tell the difference between a coupon code and a gift certificate?
Your page should answer any question that someone may ask.
And don’t forget to put your business name + coupon code in the title tag!
Similarly, you should have a dedicated Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) page that you update yearly. And as soon as BFCM ends, you should launch your BFCM page for the following year (read our 101 Black Friday Cyber Monday tips). Make sure to do more than just change every instance of the previous year to the next year!
Key-Word Rich Image Names
If you’re going to be using Hatchful for logos, Burst for free images, or Image Resizer, don’t forget to make sure your image names and alternate text are keyword rich. The keywords you’re using in your headlines and URL are great choices. This way, you can potentially rank in Google’s image search or have one of your images appear in a featured snippet on Google.
Alt-Tags
Alt-tags don’t affect SEO, but if you don’t use them then if your image doesn’t load people won’t know what they were supposed to be looking at. Additionally, alt-tags are used by screen readers for the visually impaired.
Improved User Experience
When you add all these tools together, what you end up with is an improved user experience. That’s very important because a lower bounce rate and a greater click-thru-rate (CTR) factor into search engine algorithms.
Free Tools Are a Winning Strategy
Image Courtesy of The Jopwell Collection
Shopify’s free tools make your business and website better, which makes Shopify better. But there’s another big reason to have free tools: backlinks, organic traffic, and keywords. Shopify benefits from giving away all these tools for free in the same way that Neil Pattel benefits from giving away Ubersuggest as a free keyword and content research tool (check out our Ubersuggest review and case studies).
If the time spent on a page improves your page rank, just imagine how much time someone will spend looking at 100 business name ideas from the Business Name Generator or over 1,000 slogans from the Slogan Maker. So, if you can build a calculator or tool of some kind on your website, it’ll be worth it to host it!
One easy way to get the word out about your free tool is to use Ahrefs Content Explorer (check out our Ahrefs review and case studies ) or tools like Postaga (check out our Postaga review and case studies) to find websites that are writing about the exact function your tool performs and letting them know that you have that tool so they can link to it. Ahrefs can tell you which websites have broken links to tools like yours, so you can offer a link to your tool as an alternative.
Bottom Line
All of Shopify’s tools make it easier to run your business and to improve your website. They can help you convert browsers into customers, and can be used to improve your SEO as well.
They also illustrate the value of making calculators and tools available for free, an investment that can really pay off!
