Magento, an Open Source platform, allows you to develop your eCommerce in various ways. Thanks to its numerous extensions, it makes it possible to improve different areas of your eBusiness. Of course, too many opportunities can lead to a hindered decision-making process, which is why we’ve decided to create a list of the most useful and interesting Magento extensions and divided them into categories.
CUSTOMER CARE
Zendesk
The most popular customer care extension allows you to manage all your customer service tickets and keep track of all customer communications in one place. Zendesk costs $12/year for single-service agents, and $59/month for a team of customer service representatives.
PRICE: $12-59 – GET IT HERE
Olark Live Chat
There are a lot of extensions with capabilities similar to Live Chat, but the advantage with Olark Live Chat is that it can be easily integrated with Zendesk and CRM’s like Salesforce. You can also provide your consumers with better service, answer their questions in real time, and close more sales on the go. The Bronze Package costs $17/month and the Ultimate Package costs $243/month.
PRICE: $17-243 – GET IT HERE
LOYALTY, REFFERAL CAMPAIGNS
Sweet Tooth
This extension can increase your income in a simple way by introducing a loyalty program. Magento features include loyalty points rewards for purchases, customization on how customers spend their points, a referral program that is displayed in the customer’s “My Account” section that issues points for the customers, and the ability to exchange products for points. This extension is paid, but worth its price. The cheapest option costs $59 per month. It contains up to 1,000 loyalty point transactions per month. There are also more expensive options available for $149 per month and up to 5,000 loyalty point transactions, and the unlimited Enterprise version costs 399$ per month.
PRICE: $59-399 – GET IT HERE
Yotpo
The Yotpo extension is a great tool to have. It not only makes it easy to check reviews, but it also sends a scheduled email to customers after the purchase requesting a review. There are few things besides performance that can increase your conversion rate. Nowadays, very few consumers buy a product without reading customer reviews first. Which is why reviews of products on a website can be really useful and can be a key factor for your client to make a purchase. Yotpo reduces bounce rates from your website so Clients won’t leave your shop to check the product somewhere else (your competition for instance).
PRICE: $25 – 499
PERFORMANCE
The next two extensions are aimed at boosting the performance of your eBusiness, it happens that both of them are free! So if you are in need of a performance boost, they should definitely be on your list.
Fooman Speedster
Nowadays, every microsecond is very essential in eBusiness and performance of e-shops is a key factor. It has been proven that each second of delay in website loading:
- Reduces conversion rates by 7%
- Decreases customer satisfaction by 17%
- Lowers page views by 11%
Often those delays are caused by lots of CSS and Javascript files used to develop your website. The Fooman Speedster extension deals with these problems by combining multiple CSS/Javascript files into one CCS/Javascript file and reduces the total size of those files. At the end, your service loads faster, your clients buy more, and are more satisfied.
PRICE: FREE
Lesti_Fpc
Another great extension which can give your shop a speed boost is Lesti_Fpc. A good FPC module can lower the response times and decrease app server traffic down to 5%. Lesti_Fpc takes care of internal full page cache and eliminates the need for Varnish or any other external software.
Once again, this results in a higher conversion rate and customer satisfaction.
PRICE: FREE
FRONTEND, UI, USABILITY
One Step Checkout
Have you ever wondered why your shopping cart has such a high bounce rate? It doesn’t matter why, this extension can help you solve this problem. It changes a long 4-6 step checkout process into one simple checkout page, lowering your bouncing rate and increasing the number of completed carts. One Step Checkout can easily improve conversation, customer satisfaction and consequently, their loyalty.
PRICE: $149-299
Instant Cart
Although Instant Cart is a very simple extension and doesn’t seem so “funky” at first sight, its functionality can help you increase the number of completed carts even by 20%.
What does it do? Customers can add and remove items from their cart without waiting for numerous page reloads, which can be very annoying and can lead to cart abandonment.
PRICE: $79
Sociable
According to Hubspot, consumers are 71% more likely to make a purchase based on social media referrals. That’s why it’s good to have a functional social media extension within your eBusiness. Sociable helps you by adding a simple 1-click share button on all of your webpages. If your customers find something they like, they can instantly share it with their whole network and potentially boost your sales and traffic.
PRICE: $99 – 599
OTHER
Ship Hawk
If you are a CEO and you can’t stand complicated shipment choices, this tool is definitely for you. Thanks to this extension, you can automatically calculate shipping costs right inside the shopping cart. Ship Hawk compares rates from an extensive network of parcel and freight carriers to determine the best way to ship items of any size. Additionally, it’s totally free of charge and only requires a subscription.
PRICE: FREE
Ultimate SEO Suite
SEO can generally be a bit of a headache but this extension you can make your eBusiness more SEO-friendly and boost it’s ranking in search engine results with just a few clicks. It will take care of all your canonicalization, sitemap setups, and updates.
PRICE: $149-899
Let us know what extensions you use! Feel free to contact us at sales@divante.co if you have any questions regarding Magento Extensions or Magento in general!
Published October 19, 2015
