Advertising “gurus” on TikTok often ignore or fail to share with you the real value of building a tech stack for your Shopify store. Paid ads are only part of the equation, and they only bring users to the site, but your tech stack influences every important key performance indicator for your store. To maximize each visitor’s value, your tech stack has to make it easy to build trust, create value, and make it easy for your customers to spend money.
Investing in the right tools can help you minimize lost opportunities on less effective apps/software. Here’s how I built a successful Shopify tech stack to help our top direct-to-consumer brands scale profitably.
Creating a Shopify Tech Stack That Delivers Results
Building an effective tech stack can help you optimize your store’s functions. With rising advertising costs, your brand must understand users’ actions on your store. What is frustrating them? What isn’t disappointing them? Where are the dead clicks? You need to make it easier to gather their opinions about your products. Reviews are crucial. Your clients’ feedback about your products can help you understand what drives sales. If your average order value (AOV) is on the lower end, around $25-$75, your brand will have small profit margins. To increase your AOV, consider offering product bundles to your visitors. It’s essential to understand when they will likely make a purchase, the best time to email them, and when to restock. This is how we address these issues using our successful tech stack, empowering us to make informed decisions and take control of our brand’s success.
Microsoft Clarity: The Free Tool That Outperforms HotJar
If you’re familiar with HotJar or even paying for it, you should switch to Microsoft Clarifty. Microsoft Clarity is HotJar on steroids, pushing user behavior analytics even further—at no cost. While both tools offer heatmaps, session recordings, and insights into how users interact with your website, Clarity has some unique strengths. For example, Clarity provides heatmaps for dead clicks, rage clicks, and scrolling behavior on both desktop and mobile. It even features live heatmaps, a feature HotJar lacks, enabling you to visualize user interactions in real time. In contrast, HotJar’s move maps can be integrated with eye-tracking data, but this comes at a cost. Additionally, Clarity’s session recordings track user behavior live, offering a simplified, user-friendly dashboard and unlimited data retention compared to HotJar’s 12-month data storage limit. These tools make Clarity the apparent choice. (Userpilot)(CardioLog Analytics).
Why User Recordings Are Essential for Optimizing User Experience
First-time website visitors are fickle; they are bombarded with content, ads, and products all day, so why complicate it when they visit your store? Every visit and exit can significantly impact your store’s financial viability. One frustrating click (use this term loosely), and they’re gone. Even a tiny increase in your conversion rate can mean a massive boost in revenue.
Google Analytics is great, but it needs to visually show you what users are ACTUALLY doing. The average session stat is excellent, but it offers no other value than the amount of time they spend on a specific page. That’s why user session recordings are goldmines for understanding how people behave around your store. You know what empty space they’re clicking on. Why are they clicking there? With Microsoft Clarity’s free session recording feature, you can visually track each user’s journey, figure out where they’re having trouble, and see what’s causing frustration (like dead clicks and rage clicks). This helps you make innovative changes to your site’s design, layout, and messaging, leading to more engagement and sales. Plus, they have an AI summarizer that analyzes the data for you.
Real-time session recordings and rage-click detection help catch problems before they become significant. These insights are invaluable for improving the overall user experience of your Shopify store(Userpilot).
Okendo Reviews: Boosting Trust Through Social Proof
People trust people, and they value opinions. In today’s eCommerce landscape, customer trust is critical, and reviews are a powerful tool to build it. Okendo Reviews allows DTC brands to effectively leverage social proof by showcasing detailed customer profiles in each review. This platform does more than just collect reviews; it provides in-depth insights into crucial product attributes like sizing, durability, and value, ensuring the most relevant information is presented to potential buyers. By providing this detailed information, Okendo Reviews helps customers make more informed decisions, thereby enhancing the likelihood of a sale and boosting conversion rates. It’s not just about the product; it’s about the community and trustthat comes from shared experiences.
Detailed Customer Profiling with Okendo Reviews
Okendo takes customer reviews a step further with advanced profiling features, enabling you to display reviews based on key attributes such as product quality, sizing, or durability. These highly personalized reviews provide social proof that resonates with new customers, showcasing feedback most relevant to their shopping journey. This can lead to higher customer trust, better-informed purchase decisions, and ultimately increased conversion rates. By segmenting customer reviews to highlight features that matter most to buyers, Okendo effectively reduces hesitation during the buying process. The more niche your product is, the more valuable these reviews are. People love talking about their experiences, and others love relating to them.
Fast Bundle: The Smart Way to Increase Average Order Value
If users can spend more, you should sell them more. Bundles are the #1 way of making users feel like they’re getting an offer they can’t refuse and the most significant value back from your brand. Building trust with your users will always result in higher revenue. Fast Bundle helps DTC brands increase their average order value (AOV) by allowing brands to bundle complementary products easily. It transforms how users perceive value by encouraging them to spend more while feeling like they are getting real VALUE. Bundles are perfect for selling seasonal bundles or curated product kits because they offer VALUE-based product pairings that feel organic and valuable to the customer. By making customers feel they are getting MORE for their spending, you’ll increase your AOV and returning customer rate. These two metrics are two of the most critical KPIs for scaling brands.
Intelligent Upselling Through Bundles
Make it easier for users to find VALUE in your brand so they can spend more. Fast Bundle offers flexibility, allowing brands to test different product combinations and tailor offerings based on customer preferences so that you can make the best offer that the users can’t refuse or think about for an extensive period so they can revisit your site. The ability to create personalized product bundles makes it easy to experiment with seasonal offerings or targeted upsells. This can dramatically increase AOV while improving customer satisfaction, as buyers receive complementary products that enhance their original purchase. By focusing on intelligent bundling strategies, Fast Bundle allows brands to increase the amount clients spend on their store and ultimately optimize the customer journey to convert at a higher rate.
BlackCrow AI: Elevating Paid Media Performance with Predictive Analytics
BlackCrow AI takes your paid media campaigns to the next level by leveraging predictive analytics and machine learning. This powerful tool helps DTC brands improve ad targeting by predicting which users will most likely convert. Using real-time data, BlackCrow optimizes paid media performance, reducing wasteful ad spend and increasing the likelihood of conversions. This leads to significantly improved performance on platforms like Facebook and Google Ads, ultimately enhancing paid media ROI.
How Predictive Analytics Lowers Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
Through predictive analytics, BlackCrow helps brands identify and focus on the audiences most likely to purchase, reducing customer acquisition costs (CAC). By eliminating wasted ad spend and only targeting high-conversion customers, you can lower CAC and increase return on investment (ROI) from paid advertising campaigns. This not only boosts profitability but also improves the overall efficiency of your ad spend, leading to more successful campaigns.
Upcart / Aftersell: Increasing Revenue Through Post-Purchase Upsells
Post-purchase upsells are an effective way to increase revenue without additional acquisition costs. Tools like Upcart and Aftersell provide seamless opportunities for customers to add complementary products after they’ve completed their initial purchase. This taps into the power of impulse buying while delivering additional value to the customer, all without appearing pushy or intrusive.
Leveraging Post-Purchase Offers to Boost AOV
Upcart and Aftersell naturally integrate post-purchase offers into the customer journey, encouraging customers to add complementary products at a discount after completing a transaction. This increases the AOV and enhances customer satisfaction by offering relevant, value-added products at a crucial moment in the shopping process. By leveraging these post-purchase tools, brands can grow revenue and boost the overall customer experience.
Integrating these powerful tools into your Shopify tech stack will improve user engagement, increase conversion rates, and optimize your entire sales funnel. For instance, we’ve used Microsoft Clarity to identify and resolve user experience issues and Okendo Reviews to showcase customer feedback effectively. Whether you want to elevate your ad performance or boost AOV through intelligent upselling, the right tech stack is critical to building a thriving DTC brand.
