Maintaining an online store is a challenge at the best of times. There are many aspects you need to keep track of and certain features that customers have taken for granted over the years due to using a vast array of professional and highly polished online stores.
That’s why nowadays most online store platforms offer some sort of extension or plugin system to help store owners customize their online shops and offer valuable features to their customers. Magento is no exception to this, and offers an array of solutions from various developers to help them create the storefront they’ve envisioned. A good selection of the best Magento extensions can make the difference when it comes to your store’s success.
Let’s have a look at some of them to help you stay on top and increase your sales.
Best Magento Extensions
Let’s have a look at some of the top Magento extensions, both free and paid, that can help you boost your business.
Magento Free Extensions
1. Social Login
Creating a new account can be a painful process for users, and most of them will be discouraged from shopping if they have to create, let alone remember, an account to use in a specific store.
By providing social logins, you’re allowing a person to purchase in your store while using a login that they are already acquainted with and use regularly. It reduces the main friction customers can have between browsing for products and the checkout process.
Social Login, as the name implies, is a solution to incorporate social logins in your store. It adds other useful features that can help you direct your marketing as well:
- Log in with 25+ popular social accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, etc., or just create an account.
- Allow customers to sign in using social accounts anywhere in your store: during login, while browsing the cart, at checkout, etc.
- Provides an analytics report to see what social networks are the most popular among your customers.
2. Blog PRO
If you want to create some rapport with your customers while also bringing in new ones, it’s important to maintain some communication and make your store easily findable on the web. Maintaining a blog can serve on both of these fronts.
Blog PRO allows you to add a blog to your Magento store with all the necessary tools to make it a successful marketing tool:
- Customize your blog to look exactly like you want with 7-page layouts and plenty of customization options for colors, backgrounds, etc.
- Schedule posts.
- Add related products to the post, with direct links to your store.
- Integrate your posts with social network tools that allow readers to share your content more easily.
- Import your blog posts from your WordPress blog.
3. Image Gallery
A good store will have eye-catching photos to present their products, and it’s important to show them whenever possible.
Image Gallery is a free solution that allows shop owners to set up a customizable gallery to showcase their products:
- Create galleries with varied layouts such as Carousel, Masonry, and pure Grid/List.
- Attach a gallery to any product page.
- Link images to related product pages.
- Add metadata to your images for easier SEO optimization.
- Create photo categories and use them to feed the galleries in your pages.
Magento Paid Extensions
1. Add Free Product To Cart
Your store’s best promoter is itself. When your customers browse and purchase your products, they’ve already bought in, and it’s important to keep that momentum. You can use this opportunity to present your customers with sales they will find enticing and make them want to shop some of your other products.
Add Free Product To Cart does much more than what its name initially suggests and helps with these kinds of promotional campaigns. It’s an extension that allows you to set up any kind of Magento sale in your store:
- Offer free products or sales on certain products when specific conditions are met (buy one and get one free, buy X and get a discount on Y, etc).
- Showcase items with a promotion with a special, customizable symbol.
- Set up coupon codes and under what conditions they are applicable.
2. Currency Auto Switcher
If you sell internationally, it’s important to present your products in your customers’ specific currencies whenever possible. This will bring two immediate benefits: customers can immediately see what they are paying for your products, and they won’t be turned away by immediately assuming you can’t sell internationally.
Currency Auto Switcher allows you to set your prices and their international equivalents:
- Specify which countries get shown which currencies by default and which symbol is shown with those currencies.
- Allow your customers to set which currency they see in your store.
- Set specific rates for currency conversion.
3. Shopping List Manager
Customers love to keep track of lists of items they like from a store for various reasons, chief among them to create categories of items they shop regularly or create a wishlist for later consideration and purchasing.
Shopping List Manager allows your customers to do just that:
- Create and manage multiple lists of items.
- Add products to a list with specific quantities.
- Add the products of a list to the shopping cart in one button click.
Best Magento Websites
If you’re looking for inspiration or just good examples of what Magento can accomplish, here are some of the best websites built with Magento:
- VMware
- Nike
- Land Rover
- ASUS
- OMEGA
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Which version of Magento is the best?
As is the case with most technology, it is preferable to use the latest version since it will usually be the most stable, secure, and performant. All these three points are crucial in an online store.
For this reason, we recommend using Magento 2. The latest version at the time of writing is 2.4.4.
2. What is the best Magento extension to boost sales?
As with anything when it comes to business, this will largely depend on the type of bottleneck you are facing with your store. Depending on that, you’ll want a different extension to alleviate your issues.
If you’re wondering “Which Magento module helps to increase the sales of the company?”, it’s time to evaluate your business and look at what it’s missing:
- Is your number of customers low? This can indicate a problem of discoverability, so perhaps a plugin that boosts your SEO will be a good place to start.
- Do you have a low turnover rate? This can indicate one of two (or both) issues: the product page isn’t enticing enough, or the checkout process isn’t streamlined. Look closely into your product pages and the checkout process and discover what may be setting your customers back and look into Magento’s best extensions to alleviate those issues.
- Do your customers not come back after a purchase? This, again, can signify two distinct issues: either their last purchase didn’t go smoothly and they’re avoiding purchasing from your store again, or they’ve forgotten about your store altogether. Look into extensions that either allow for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or direct marketing.
- Do you have difficulty keeping track of your orders? Slow times to deliver can turn away customers, so it’s important to be expedient. Look into extensions that help with the management of the store’s inventory and possibly others to help with shipping.
Conclusion
Magento’s ecommerce extension ecosystem is vast and filled with multiple solutions for the many issues ecommerce store owners face regularly. We hope to have given you some good options for extensions you may need or otherwise are curious about, but haven’t tried.
That said, if you’re looking for developers to make custom solutions for your Magento ecommerce store, DistantJob is here to help! Magento uses primarily web technology to develop extensions, and we can help you find expert PHP developers, JavaScript developers, or even web developers that fit your company culture and that can help you unleash your store’s maximum potential. Get in touch with us today!
