Speed Up Your Workflow: 26 Google Chrome Extensions for E-Commerce Business Owners

9 min read

We’re coming up on a new year, and with that new year comes new goals for your business. Whether your goals involve more sales, more time with your family, or quitting your day job, most of them probably come down to being more productive with the time you spend on your e-commerce business.

Productivity isn’t just about buying a planner and waking up early, it’s also in the small shortcuts you take every day — like the ones these 26 Google Chrome extensions will help you with.

Read on for the full list of extensions and tips on how each one can help you.

Blocking distractions

Stay off Twitter and Facebook: StayFocusd (or a similar but cheekier extension, Go F-cking Work) can let you block any site you want to keep it from becoming a productivity black hole when you’re trying to work on your business.

Removing that tab until you need it: Tab Snooze will let you put that tab out of sight until the day and time you need it.

Keep people from talking to you on Facebook messenger: Ghost for Facebook allows you to talk to people, without having a “last seen” timestamp or being showed as online.

Staying organized

To keep track of all those tabs: Toby is a genius app that lets you save all of your tabs in a current session, organize tabs into “work” and “personal,” and effectively turn your tabs into a to-do list by reminding you which tabs you need to work in later, every time you open a new tab.

For saving important information: Evernote and OneNote both offer web clippers for Chrome — you can save, tag, and organize pages directly from your browser. There’s also Candy, which is a visual bookmarker and organization system that lets you highlight text from a webpage, then save it and organize it via collections called “storylines,” with the rest of the information just a click away (and Slack, Trello, and Facebook integrations, to boot!).

For in-browser task management: Any.do and Wunderlist both offer Chrome extensions to help you stay organized even when the mobile app isn’t at hand (and without having to go to their websites).

To never lose something important because you’re on your phone: Pushbullet comes with a Chrome extension and unites all of your devices, making it seamless to send links (or pretty much anything else) back and forth between them.

To never have to do time-zone math on the fly again: Figure It Out lets you pick up to ten time zones that are automatically displayed on new tabs — no more frantically googling “what time is it in Sydney right now” at the drop of a hat.

To prevent those embarrassing typos: The Grammarly Chrome extension will save all your website copy (and tweets, and…pretty much anything else you type) from those typos that can tank a product description.

SMM

Social media and marketing

Schedule social shares, faster: Buffer and Hootsuite both offer Chrome extensions that let you schedule shares from the browser, without leaving the page you’re on. There’s also the Share to Facebook extension, which lets you share a link to a personal profile or a business page without leaving the page you’re on.

Create UTM tags on the fly: UTM tags are necessary for tracking the results of specific social, marketing, and advertising campaigns — but they can be a pain to create. The Effin Amazing UTM Builder lets you easily create links with UTM tags and save presets for different campaigns. You have no excuse not to have flawless UTM tags now.

Find the perfect email to send that PR pitch to: As an ecommerce business owner, you often have to do your own PR and marketing — and email is a big part of that. The Slik Prospector extension lets you find anyone’s email, right from their LinkedIn profile.

Maximizing your hashtags: A good hashtag can make or break a tweet, but how do you know which hashtags are being most commonly used? RiteTag gives you in-browser color-coding of hashtags so you know which ones will boost your tweets (and which ones you shouldn’t even bother with).

Spying on SEO: The MozBar extension lets you see what others are doing for their SEO efforts and how you can improve the SEO of your pages, via comparing link metrics, highlighting links and keywords, exposing page elements, and giving you access to other powerful SEO tools (for free!).

Checking out analytics without leaving your site: The Page Analytics (by Google) plugin lets you see your statistics for your site while you’re browsing around it, along with how visitors are interacting with specific links on your page. (Haven’t set up Google Analytics for your Ecwid store yet? What are you waiting for? Here’s a step-by-step tutorial.)

Gmail tools

If you only install one email tool: You should make it MixMax, which offers a full-featured free version and an option to upgrade to paid for additional features. The free version lets you create email templates and insert them with text shortcuts, schedule emails to be sent later, and snooze emails to be brought back to the top of your inbox later.

To stay organized when pitching people: Streak CRMis largely intended for sales teams, but is also incredibly useful when you’re pitching several different journalists, bloggers, or influencers at the same time and need to keep organized on who you’ve heard back from, who you haven’t, and who you should follow up with.

For when you need an hour to catch up on your inbox without getting distracted: Inbox Pause lets you pause your email for an indefinite amount of time. It’s great for when you need to work through a backlog of emails without seeing the new ones coming in, but you can also use it to pause emails at the end of a work day or over a long weekend where you really want to clock out.

To turn your email into a Trello-like board: Sortd lets you turn your email inbox into a kanban-style board, which you can then organize into labels like “to do,” “follow up,” or any other label you want to create, in a drag-and-drop interface.

To get a reminder of who you’re talking to and why: Clearbit Connect pulls together an info-sheet on every person in your Gmail inbox, giving you their location, social profiles, business sites, and more.

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Mar 5, 2020

About the author

Michelle is a freelance writer living in Richmond, VA, with her Shiba Inu and cat named after the Hulk. When she's not writing about business, she can usually be found working on her novel series or other side projects, or training Brazilian jiu-jitsu.