Starting a business by setting up a store on Shopify is a complicated journey. There are different aspects that you, as a store owner, need to manage such as visual storefront, inventory, customer service, finance, etc. Marketing is also one of the most critical elements as it will create brand awareness and drive traffic to make sales.
It’s nearly impossible for a busy Shopify store owner to manually take care of everything on his own. So, to help its users tackle their fundamental marketing steps, Shopify introduced Kit as an automated marketing assistant.
Kit has gained enormous popularity among Shopify merchants as it brings great value. But unfortunately, after 9 years of operations, Shopify decided to shut down Kit for good.
In this blog, we will give you all the information about Shopify Kit, and its features and suggest some alternatives for Kit.
What is Shopify Kit?
Shopify Kit is a virtual employee provided for small business owners and solo entrepreneurs. Kit will help creates, manages, and promotes ads on multiple platforms including Telegram, Facebook, and Instagram.
It is a professional marketing assistant who will send you personally tailored marketing suggestions on daily basis. Kit will integrate your Shopify store with other social platforms and handle all the marketing-related activities. All you need to do is to approve its suggestions and the work is basically done.
Sound amazing right, one thing that is more amazing about this Shopify Kit is that it is free for all Shopify users. You do not have to spend more money to hire marketing staff who do not always do the job as you expect.
So what exactly does Shopify Kit do?
Main Features of Shopify Kit
There are many tasks Shopify Kit can do for you through an automatical chatbox. It will propose a list of things and complete them after receiving a “yes” from you. I will show you some of its functions.
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Create business reports
Shopify Kit can keep track of your store and create business performance reports accordingly. It will monitor how many users have visited your store and what they have done to create advertising campaigns to boost sales. You can require Shopify Kit to give you report data from the last 24 hours up to 31 days.
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Interact with customers
The customer journey is not limited to the purchasing stage, it spreads far beyond that and Kit knows how to serve in these post-purchasing stages. It will help you keep close contact with customers by sending them messages to review their purchases.
Customers’ reviews then will be monitored and used to further enhance the customer experience at your store. Whenever a bad review is recorded, you will be notified to reply in time. Shopify Kit is also able to send “thank you” messages to show customers your appreciation and invitation to visit again.
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Create ads
You can utilize Shopify Kit to create ads on Facebook and Instagram for your products by answering three questions consisting of whether you want to run the ads, which products you want to run the ads for, and your budget for the ads. After that, it will show you the preview of the ads, you can make further adjustments to best serve your marketing purpose.
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Remind customers of their abandoned carts
Sometimes customers do not abandon their shopping cart on purpose and it’s Shopify Kit’s job to remind them to finish their purchasing. It will send follow-up emails to notify customers about their carts. The number of prospective customers will be reported to you for analysis reasons.
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Save time for you to do other tasks
The above features are just some of many more things Shopify can do to help you with your marketing tasks. It will certainly save a lot of time for you to invest in other aspects such as enhancing UX/UI, managing your inventory, and adding new products to your product lists. This is a handy app for busy store owners.
Unfortunately…Shopify shut down Kit
On March 1st, 2021, Shopify sent an email to all Kit users about the shutdown of Kit. It will become ineffective after August 31st, 2021.
Shopify shut down Kit
There are several reasons for this circumstance. One of them might be the underwhelmed performance of automated marketing. It is undeniably a great idea for newbie entrepreneurs but when the marketing competition becomes more sophisticated, Shopify Kit simply cannot handle the task to such a complex level.
Shopify Kit Alternatives
Now, with no Kit, what should you do?
As one of the Shopify staff suggested, some of the functionality of Kit is integrated into Shopify admin such as creating marketing campaigns on Facebook, and Google and creating email marketing.
Now you need to manually create marketing campaigns from your admin page.
Shopify suggestion
However, in order to save you from the tedious job, I would like to recommend some apps that can somehow replace Shopify Kit’s functions.
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Embed Instagram and TikTok feeds on your website
Socialwidget
Socialwidget is a good place to start if you want to embed stunning Instagram and TikTok feeds onto your Shopify website. It will help you show TikTok & Instagram’s feeds right on the store whenever customers visit.
You can further customize them by setting the right theme and style which suit your store. Social Widget also ensures the loading speed from these platforms is optimized so that customers will find it easy to shop around.
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Generate regular Facebook & Twitter updates
Socialpublish
Apart from Instagram and Tiktok’s platforms which are optimized for the image content, it would be best if you used Facebook and Twitter to maintain a close connection with customers by creating new updates for products and promotions.
Socialpublish will get the job done for you in no time. Just with a few clicks, you can make the updating schedule and it will automatically create new posts about the products for you. Whether it is about promoting a new collection, a new product, and reviews from your customers, it only takes a minute or so.
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Maintain customer relationships through Chatbot
Socialreply
What is more amazing for customers when they first visit your chatbox is to provide them with all sorts of information they need immediately. This is when Socialreply comes into place. This app will help you create a chatbox with the most asked questions regarding your products.
Customers can directly place their orders while chatting with you by switching to other pages. All the information about the customers on Facebook will then be synced with your Shopify’s customer list which makes it easier for you to manage orders.
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Track your performance
TrueProfit
What is better than having an app that helps you keep track of all the costs and gives you profit analysis in different time ranges. You are able to receive profit reports daily through mail or monitor them through a mobile app.
All the figures will be visualized with easy-to-understand displace which gives users the overall view of their business performance. This app is called TrueProfit. Its amazing performance is proven by the positive reviews left by TrueProfit’s users.
Give it a try if you are struggling with analyzing tasks, you won’t be disappointed.
Final Thought
Shopify Kit is undeniably a powerful marketing tool for boosting Facebook and Instagram’s ads. However, the app was shut down and it is best for you to find alternatives as soon as possible to keep up with the harsh marketing competition.
If you have any more questions regarding Shopify Kit, feel free to contact us anytime.