Communicating with customers is extremely important when running a Shopify store, and an effective contact form is at the heart of that communication. This article compares and introduces excellent contact form apps for Shopify, as well as outstanding form services that can be used outside of Shopify. We explain the features, pricing plans, and functionality of each service in detail to help you find the best solution for your business.
What is a contact form?
A contact form is an input field placed on an online store that allows customers to send questions, requests, and opinions to the store. For online stores, it is often used to accept inquiries, but it can also be used for a wide range of purposes such as surveys, requests for materials, membership registration, and cancellation requests, making it an indispensable part of running an online store.
The importance of contact forms
A contact form is an essential element for an online store. Its importance is wide-ranging and contributes significantly to business success.
- Promoting communication with customers
- Streamlining inquiry management
- Reducing spam email
- Improving brand image
- Opportunities to boost sales
- Reducing legal risk
As you can see, a well-designed contact form is an important tool that directly contributes to improved customer service, business efficiency, and increased sales. By making the most of this feature, Shopify store owners can also achieve greater competitiveness and sustainable growth.
Promoting communication with customers
First, a contact form is an important tool for promoting communication with customers. Customers can easily send questions and opinions regardless of time or location. This allows businesses to gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and issues and to respond appropriately. Centralized inquiry management and auto-reply features also help streamline customer support.
Streamlining inquiry management
In addition, a contact form also serves as a means of collecting valuable customer information. The collected data can be used for marketing and product development, contributing to business growth. Because it is available 24 hours a day, it can handle inquiries outside business hours or from overseas, leading to improved customer satisfaction.
Reducing spam email
From a security standpoint, contact forms are also important. Since there is no need to publish an email address directly, the risk of spam email is reduced. In addition, by incorporating features like reCAPTCHA, you can prevent automatically sent spam and focus on communicating with genuinely necessary customers.
Improving brand image
A well-organized contact form enhances business credibility and contributes to an improved brand image. A customized design helps maintain brand consistency, while courteous responses and quick replies can increase customer satisfaction.
Opportunities to boost sales
Contact forms also provide opportunities to boost sales. By accepting detailed questions about products or services, you can provide information that helps drive a purchase decision, and inquiries often lead to further business discussions. High-quality customer support can also be expected to improve repeat purchase rates.
Reducing legal risk
Contact forms also play an important role from a legal perspective. By incorporating consent to a privacy policy or terms of service, you can reduce legal risk. It also allows you to design forms that comply with data protection regulations such as the GDPR, which is useful when expanding your business internationally.
Features and limitations of Shopify's standard contact form
Shopify provides the basic functionality needed to build an online store, and this includes a contact form. As shown in the attached image, when you sign up with Shopify, a contact form is registered as a standard page.
This standard contact form has the benefit of being free to use, but it also has some limitations.
Features of Shopify's standard contact form
First, one feature of Shopify's standard contact form is that it can be set up easily. Simply select "Contact form" from the theme customization section and add it to a page. This ease of use is a major advantage, especially for store owners with little technical knowledge.
The standard form also includes basic fields. Specifically, it includes fields for name, email address, phone number, and message body. In many cases, these are sufficient to collect the minimum information needed to communicate with customers.
In terms of security, Shopify's standard form has built-in anti-spam functionality. This provides some protection against automatically generated spam messages.
Furthermore, mobile support is provided as standard. Since Shopify themes generally use responsive design, the form displays and works properly when accessed from smartphones and tablets.
Limitations of Shopify's standard contact form
On the other hand, Shopify's standard contact form has the following limitations:
- Customization limitations: The standard form has limited customization options, such as adding or removing fields or changing labels. For example, you cannot add business-specific fields such as an order number or product category.
- Design limitations: There are few customization options for the form's layout and styling, which can make it difficult to reflect your brand's uniqueness.
- Lack of advanced features: Advanced features such as file uploads, conditional logic (changing displayed fields based on specific answers), and multi-step forms are not provided as standard.
- Validation limitations: The standard form performs basic validation (such as checking required fields), but more complex validation (such as checking a specific email format or credit card number) cannot be implemented.
- Auto-reply limitations: Customization of the automatic reply email sent when an inquiry is received is limited in the standard form. You cannot finely configure the message content or the conditions for sending it.
- Data management limitations: Management and analysis of received inquiries is limited. For example, there is no feature to automatically categorize inquiries by type or automatically tag them based on specific conditions.
- Limited integration with third-party tools: The standard form makes it difficult to directly integrate with CRM systems or marketing tools, limiting automatic data syncing and utilization.
Because of these limitations, store owners who need more complex business functionality or customer interaction will likely need to consider a solution using a third-party app or custom development. However, for small businesses or new store owners for whom a simple inquiry function is sufficient, Shopify's standard contact form can fully serve its purpose.
How to configure and customize Shopify's standard contact form
Create a new contact page
- From the Shopify admin, select "Online Store" > "Pages"
- Click "Add page"
- Enter a title and set the theme template to "contact"
- Click "Save"
Add a link to the contact page in the navigation menu
- Select "Online Store" > "Navigation"
- Select the menu you want to edit
- Click "Add menu item"
- Select the contact page you created
- Click "Add"
- Click "Save"
Add a contact form to each page
- Select "Online Store" > "Themes"
- Click "Customize" on the Shopify theme you want to edit
- Select the page you want to add the contact form to
- Click "Add section/block"
- Select the "Contact form" section
- Customize the heading, colors, and other settings
- Click "Save"
Set the email address that receives inquiries
- Select "Settings" > "Notifications"
- Change the sender email address
- Click "Save"
Configuring Google reCAPTCHA
By setting up Google reCAPTCHA, you can block some automatically generated spam messages created by bots.
- Select "Online Store" > "Preferences"
- Check "Enable Google reCAPTCHA for contact and comment forms"
- Click "Save"
Design customization
- Select "Online Store" > "Themes" > "Customize"
- From the select box at the top center of the screen, choose the "contact" template
- Select "Contact form"
- Adjust basic design elements such as colors (custom CSS allows even more flexible customization)
- Click Save
Adding and removing fields
Shopify's standard contact form has limitations when it comes to adding or removing fields. If you need a more advanced contact form, you will need to install a Shopify app or customize the source code.
Setting validation rules
The standard contact form includes basic validation, such as required fields, but if you need more advanced validation rules, you will need to install a Shopify app or customize the source code.
3 recommended contact form apps
Improved contact form
Improved Contact Form is a full-featured contact form app for Shopify stores. It offers a freely customizable contact form that can be displayed as a pop-up, comes with security features and mobile support, and offers a wide range of plans from free to paid, making it an easy-to-use app.
Improved Contact Form pricing plans
| Plan name | Price | Key features |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | Free | - Up to 3 forms or widgets can be published - "Powered By" branding is displayed |
| Premium | $12/month | - Up to 10 widgets can be published - Target widgets by page, location, referrer, and device - Advanced trigger functionality - Remove all branding - Third-party integrations |
| Advanced | $29/month | - Includes all Premium features - Unlimited widgets can be published |
Powerful Contact Form Builder
Powerful Contact Form Builder is a versatile form-building app that can be flexibly added to any page on Shopify. It supports a variety of form types such as inquiries, membership registration, and surveys, offers detailed design customization and email marketing integration, and provides a wide range of plans from free up to $19.9/month, cost-effectively supporting business growth and stronger marketing strategies.
| Plan name | Price | Key features |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Free | Display forms anywhere Create 1 form 40 submissions/month File uploads |
| Premium plan | $9.99/month | All Free plan features Unlimited forms 1,000 submissions/month Max upload file size 30MB 2GB storage Cart forms Bulk order forms Conditional logic |
| PRO plan | $19.90/month | All Premium plan features Unlimited forms 10,000 submissions/month Max upload file size 100MB 10GB storage Zapier integration Google Sheets integration, Google Calendar integration |
formrun
formrun is a form-building app made in Japan. By choosing one template from a wide range of templates, anyone can easily create a form. To use the app, you need a paid subscription to the external "formrun" service, and it's available starting from formrun's BEGINNER paid plan or higher.
formrun pricing plans
| Plan name | Price | Key features |
|---|---|---|
| BEGINNER | ¥3,880/month (excl. tax) | - Forms that can be created: 5 - Team members: 2 - Attachment storage: 5GB - Monthly form responses: 100/form - Duplicate response prevention - Auto-reply email - Email templates - Notifications to chat tools - Hide formrun credit |
| STARTER | ¥12,980/month (excl. tax) | - Forms that can be created: 50 - Team members: 5 - Attachment storage: 10GB - Monthly form responses: Unlimited - CSV/Excel export - Google Analytics integration - Bulk email delivery |
| PROFESSIONAL | ¥25,800/month (excl. tax) | - Forms that can be created: Unlimited - Team members: 10 - Attachment storage: 30GB - Monthly form responses: Unlimited - Custom domain email address - IP restrictions for admin login users - Automatic data export - Ad tag placement |
| Enterprise plan | Contact for pricing | - Custom domain for the site - Custom permission management - Increased form attachment capacity (300MB+) - Multi-tenant functionality - Log viewing - Onboarding support program |
Recommended contact form services besides Shopify apps
Tally forms
Tally forms is a form builder service that is free to use and combines intuitive operation with a beautiful design. Anyone can easily create a full-featured form without any coding, and it offers advanced features such as conditional branching logic, custom calculations, file uploads, and multilingual support. It integrates with other tools such as Notion, and can easily be added to a Shopify store by inserting an embed code. It's a great service when you want to separate contact forms by purpose.
Summary
This article introduced excellent contact form solutions for Shopify stores. Here's a quick recap of each service's features:
- Improved contact form: A simple, easy-to-use free option
- Powerful Contact Form Builder: Advanced customization and versatility
- formrun: A Japan-made service with rich Japanese-language support
- Tally forms: An intuitive form builder that can be used outside of Shopify as well
By choosing the best tool for your business needs and budget, you can improve communication with customers and drive business growth.
In the blog post below, we introduce recommended Shopify apps in various categories besides form builder apps, including "customer acquisition," "sales growth," and "blog article enhancement." Find the Shopify apps that are right for your Shopify store!
