Did you know that there are 529,013 live Shopify stores in the Apparel category? 🤔 As you’re already aware, these stores face numerous daily challenges and have various needs for their operations. Discounts, bulk product sales, syncing, marketing, inventory management, and more! Well, but is it possible to manage all these processes effectively? Absolutely! What you need is to discover top-notch Shopify apps for apparel businesses. In this article, we are going to explore these apps. But let's first start with understanding why you must manage these operations effectively. 💫

Why Do You Need Shopify Apps for Managing Apparel Operations?

When an apparel store creates a purchase order for materials or products, it must effectively manage many processes until the order is successfully delivered to the customer. Let’s talk about why you should use third-party applications to achieve success.

📦 Inventory Management App for Apparel Business

Why do you need to manage your apparel inventory efficiently? Because online apparel brands face various problems like stockout, seasonality, and supply chain issues when managing their inventory. A functional inventory management app can solve these inventory problems and support your growth, especially if you have a growing store with a wide variety and many products. 👕👗

You might be wondering why Excel or just using Shopify wouldn't be sufficient at this point. While Excel is an accessible and useful application for beginners, it may not be the right choice for your apparel store as you aim to grow. Here are three reasons why:

• Manual data entry in Excel 📝 is open to making mistakes, which can cause inventory inaccuracies and potential revenue losses.
• Excel lacks automation features, making it challenging to manage and update inventory efficiently, especially as the number of products increases. 🧤
• Keeping track of inventory in Excel manually can be very time-consuming, so you cannot spare time for strategic decision-making for your store. ⏳

How about Shopify? Even Shopify is helpful when you are new in the market, but you can experience limitations over time. It lacks advanced planning and purchasing features. Specifically, it doesn't allow exporting purchase orders, syncing with other apps, forecasting, or providing a dedicated planning interface. Considering all this, we understand that managing inventory operations correctly is crucial and that without the right tool, it might not be as efficient as it could be. Efficient inventory management is essential for your apparel store, and it's a process that needs to be well-managed.

👥 Customer Engagement for Fashion Brand Success

As Philip Kotler once said: ‘’The best advertising is done by satisfied customers.’’ We agree and believe customer engagement is crucial for your fashion store to keep them satisfied and make them come, visit your store. Effective customer engagement is not just a strategy; it's a vital process that requires careful management.

Establishing transparent communication with customers, managing backorder and preorder processes efficiently, providing timely support, and taking customer feedback into account are all essential for properly managing this process. ****While customers and their demands lead your store’s plans for the future, keeping in touch and being transparent with them is necessary for a successful business.

While Shopify provides you some beneficial tools to use, benefit a third-party apps such as Klaviyo can increase your fashion store's success by boosting customer engagement. Why? These apps offer additional features and functionalities beyond what Shopify alone provides. By leveraging these features, you can effectively engage with your customers, address their needs, and build better relationships that brings success to your business.

💌 Marketing and Promotion: The Life and Blood of Apparel Brands

As the number of Shopify stores continues to grow daily and competition intensifies, marketing and promotional efforts should become an indispensable part of your fashion store. These are crucial components of online fashion businesses, especially if you want to increase your store’s brand awareness. Through email campaigns, influencer collaborations, advertising, and other strategies, your clothing store can reach more potential customers, thereby boosting revenue.

While Shopify provides basic support for marketing activities, you may find the need to generate more transparent, fast, and personalized services in your marketing processes. Shopify's built-in features may not fully meet such needs of your fashion store. On the other hand, many third-party marketing tools specialize in this area, offers services that make your business more visible and attractive for customers.

📊 Analytics and Insights

Making accurate evaluations of your apparel store's past sales, learning from them, and creating more realistic plans for the future is only possible through accurate and comprehensive data analysis. You should be able to quickly enter data, save it, and perform various analyses. The accuracy of this data and analysis directly affects future customer demand predictions and your plans. This allows you to increase revenue with realistic plans, improve supplier relationships, and prevent stock issues. In short, reaching reliable analytics and data makes your online fashion store more profitable so that you can respond to changes effectively.

Considering the importance of this process, you can use one of the many specialized Shopify apps to ensure more accurate management of such vital process. Using Excel or tracking your data in Shopify may seem easy and cost-effective, especially if your store is new, but as your apparel store grows, you may need a specialized third-party app for this purpose.

🛍️ Product Bundling and Upselling

Selling multiple products through bundles is a great sales strategy for both increasing revenue and selling less popular items. While trends, campaigns, and discounts play a significant role in the fashion industry, bundling is crucial. For example, offering a "Summer Essentials Bundle" consisting of a summer dress, bikini, sunglasses, and a beach bag at a discounted price can attract customers looking for a complete summer outfit while also boosting sales for less popular items. It is a vital feature for an apparel store to have and apply.

Shopify's standard features may not be sufficient for implementing effective product bundling strategies. To create and manage bundles with discounts and inventory tracking, a dedicated Shopify app is essential.

📌 ABC analysis can help you determine which of your products are selling the most, generating the most revenue, and which are more suitable for bundling. You can read ABC Analysis for eCommerce Inventory to learn more.

In short, you can manage your apparel store both with Excel and Shopify. However, if their benefits doesn't match with your needs, the efficiency of your apparel store's operations and ultimately your profits will decrease. 📉 It's important to find and start to use Shopify apps that will save you time, simplify your business operations, and ultimately increase customer satisfaction and revenue. Before we dive into the Shopify app list we've prepared for you, let's take a closer look at what to consider when selecting these apps together.

What to Consider When Choosing the Best Apps for the Apparel Industry?

After understanding the important operations of an apparel store, you may think that Shopify apps can help you manage these processes better. We are on the same page, then! But what factors should you look after when choosing the right app?

Customer Reviews and Shopify Ratings

💌 Shopify offers many apps for almost every aspect of your store. Finding a marketing or bundling app is not difficult, but the real challenge is finding one with satisfied customers. Who knows a product best? Those who have used it before. That's why customer reviews and ratings are among the most important compasses when finding the right apps!

Features and Functionality

📱 You should ensure that the product you use has all the essential features you need for your fashion store. We suggest you determine in advance what you and your team are looking for in the type of app you want to purchase and start your search accordingly. At this stage, trying out multiple apps of the same type and scheduling demos with the owners of those apps will help you make the right decision and gain perspective on the matter.

Ease of Integration

🧩 Since each operation requires a different app, it's essential that these apps work seamlessly together. Let's say you decide to use Fabrikatör for inventory management, but you also need to use Klaviyo for your email campaigns. After a quick check, you can find that there is integration between the two, allowing you to use them together successfully. We recommend considering the apps you choose as pieces of a puzzle and ensuring they are as compatible as possible!

Price

💵 When it comes to pricing, your budget is obviously a key consideration. However, price shouldn't be your only concern. As long as the app meets your criteria and has a reasonable price, you should give it a chance and at least try it out. You can look for Shopify apps that offer a good balance of price and features and consider any additional costs for premium features or add-ons.

Customer Support

📞 A topic frequently mentioned in customer ratings and reviews: customer support. When you purchase a new Shopify app, you invest both time and money to adopt it and integrate it into your fashion store. Effective communication with customer support is crucial for making this transition efficiently and easily. Communicating when you have questions and requests saves you time and brings operational success. This brings us back to the first point: we highly recommend you to read the customer comments before making a decision.

We discussed why we need additional Shopify apps and which factors to consider when choosing them. Let’s review the Shopify app list we think you should check!

Top Shopify Apps for Fashion Businesses

1. Fabrikatör Inventory Assistant

▪️ For your apparel store, Fabrikatör, with its 5/5 Shopify rating, is an inventory solution that can effectively manage all your inventory processes. You can create purchase orders in seconds when ordering materials or products for your fashion business. In the background, Fabrikatör controls your store's stock levels and tells you how much inventory you'll need, minimizing the risk of out-of-stock issues. In case of an unexpected stockout, you can continue to earn revenue by accepting backorders. Additionally, you can conduct detailed analyses and generate reports on all your apparel products. Moreover, Fabrikatör integrates with other apps you might need, such as Klaviyo and ShipHero. Plus, it's highly beloved by customers! You can try it for free right now.

▪️ It is ideal for growing fashion brands on Shopify, which has a wide range of products.

▪️ Fabrikatör has 4 plans, including one free plan, and the monthly cost of this app changes between $99 to $199. Learn more.

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2. Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS

▪️ This solution helps apparel stores grow faster and more efficiently by using customer data to create personalized email and SMS campaigns ✉️. It centralizes data from over 350 integrations, allowing seamless customer engagement across all channels. You can improve your marketing efforts with built-in AI tools, proven email and automation templates, and peer benchmarks. Klaviyo provides real-time revenue data for each campaign, segment, and channel so that you can make data-driven decisions. To keep the engagement strong, you can create segments and triggers using all-time data for scenarios like welcome messages, back-in-stock notifications, abandoned cart reminders, and price drop alerts.

▪️ Ideal for both new and growing Shopify apparel stores with its reasonable price, quick adaptation process, and various AI-supported tools it offers.

▪️ This solution offers two different plans: SMS services at $15 per month and email services at $20 per month. Additionally, there is a limited free plan available. You can learn more now.

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3. Gorgias

▪️ For an apparel store, Gorgias offers a comprehensive solution for customer support, merging all support channels into a single inbox. It gathers customers’ data based on their past purchases and preferences whenever they contact you so that you can send personalized messages. This app enables apparel businesses to manage various communication channels, such as emails, chats, calls, and social media messages like Instagram and TikTok, all in one place. This means you quickly respond to customer questions and increase the quality of customer support and customer satisfaction. With features like order management and AI-powered ticket handling, Gorgias makes support teams efficiently handle customer inquiries. It also provides valuable insights through Revenue Statistics, allowing apparel businesses to understand how support activities impact sales and make informed decisions. Additionally, it offers 24/7 support options so the Gorgias customers can access assistance whenever needed.

▪️ Suitable for new and growing apparel stores in the market due to its reliable customer support, affordable pricing for every budget, and wide range of features.

▪️ The price of this app ranges from $10 to $900 per month. Learn more now.

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4. Vitals: Reviews, Upsells & 40+

▪️ This 5/5-rated Shopify app is designed to help Shopify store owners turn more website visitors into satisfied customers. With this app, you can easily import and gather product reviews, increase revenue through upsells and bundled offers, and expand your email list with pop-up forms. Vitals also provides essential features like wishlists, urgency notifications, email & push marketing, Instagram feed integration, and much more to enhance the shopping experience. You can create unlimited bundles and volume discounts and even record and replay visitor actions to better understand user behavior.

▪️ The app seems suitable for new and emerging apparel stores in the market due to its reliable customer support, various pricing options, and wide range of features.

▪️ The price of this app ranges from $29.99 to $299.99 per month. Learn more now.

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5. Report Toaster: Custom Reports

▪️Report Toaster by Cloudlab is a powerful reporting and analytics tool you can use for your Shopify clothing store. It gives you real-time access to your store data so you can easily create, schedule, and export custom reports. With Report Toaster, you can tailor reports by adding columns, applying filters, and sorting data as needed. You can also group, aggregate, and compare data over time, plus track commissions and retrieve information from tags or meta fields. The app offers more than 120 ready-to-use report templates to jumpstart your analysis. You can export reports as PDF or CSV files for email sharing or Excel analysis. Plus, you can schedule reports for automated delivery via email, SMS, or Slack, and share live report links with your team or third parties. And if you have multiple stores, Report Toaster supports multi-store reporting, allowing you to compare data across all your shops. This is particularly useful given Shopify's limitations in reporting and analytics.

▪️ This app is ideal for Shopify fashion stores who needs deeper insights into their business performance through detailed reporting and analytics.

▪️ The price of this app ranges from $9 to $150 per month, and it also has a free plan. Learn more.

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6. Alpha: Sale & Discount Manager

▪️ This 4,9/5-rated sale and discount app might be beneficial for your apparel store. You can easily apply discounts and adjust product prices in bulk for hundreds of items. Plus, you can set up various discount options tailored to different customer groups and schedule flash sales with automatic start and end times. During active sales, customizable announcement bars can be displayed to promote discounts, and customers can see their savings in the cart. Discount management is hassle-free, featuring automation, bulk editing, campaigns, tagging, and targeting. You have a range of discount types to choose from, including banners, special discounts, fixed pricing, fixed discounts, limited-time offers, and percentage discounts. Additionally, you can set up single or recurring discount schedules and roll back discounts as needed, all without impacting store speed.

▪️ Ideal for apparel stores that are new in the market, with its reasonable pricing and user-friendly features.

▪️ The price of this app ranges from $9.99 to $22.99 per month, and it also has a free plan. Learn more.

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7. Synkro: Inventory Sync

▪️ Synkro is a powerful inventory and product syncing solution crafted specifically for apparel businesses managing multiple stores. It ensures seamless management by synchronizing inventory levels and product properties in real-time, updating within seconds. With Synkro, you can effortlessly clone products between stores with just one click or use tag-based auto-cloning for efficiency. The platform also offers customizable price rules, allowing automatic adjustments to product prices to accommodate dynamic pricing strategies commonly used in the apparel industry. Moreover, you can schedule inventory adjustments to automate product drops, streamlining your operations further. Synkro also provides a dedicated customer support to assist apparel businesses every step of the way.

▪️ Ideal for apparel businesses managing multiple stores or online platforms.

▪️ The price of this app ranges from $10 to $100 per month. Learn more on the Shopify app store.

Keep Track of Your Inventory with Fabrikatör!

Inventory management is perhaps the most critical process for your fashion store because efficient management is essential for delivering products to customers on time. With Fabrikatör, you can do this effectively and easily, making your clothing store more profitable. 💸 How?

Fabrikatör achieves all inventory tasks with its seamless features,

• With more realistic and insightful demand forecasting,  you can anticipate customer needs accurately and maintain optimal inventory levels for your clothing store.
• You can create purchase orders in seconds and streamline the procurement process.
• You can keep selling with backorders and fulfill customer demands even when your store is temporarily out of stock
• You can restock your stock quickly with Fabrikatör to ensure you have enough stock of your store’s favorite product.
• You can better understand your entire inventory process with advanced and detailed reports and analysis.
• You can build better relationships with both suppliers and customers thanks to better inventory management.

Would you like to hear from experts about what you can achieve with Fabrikatör and get a firsthand look at its capabilities? See Fabrikatör in action now! 🚀

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