Running an e-commerce store or creating a marketplace is a lucrative dream for many. However, what remains largely unknown to the average audience is what goes into running an online store efficiently. If you’re someone who wants to shift your business online on Magento or have already built one, this post is for you.
Magento, as you would know, is one of the leading e-commerce website building platforms, founded in 2008, now owned by Adobe. Of all the features that Magento provides, the one thing that sets Magento apart is its extensions and modules.
There are thousands of Magento extensions and modules available. However, it is extremely important to ensure that you install extensions only from trusted sources that are verified. You can check the statistics and reviews from Magento Marketplace and identify which extension developer has a credible profile. For example, extension developer such as FMEextenstions has a strong footprint on Magento Marketplace and offers a broad range of verified extensions.
Picking the best extensions can become quite an unnerving process if you have this many choices. But to simplify things and help you set up your store quickly, we have listed the best 11 for you. All these extensions cover different areas of your online business and collectively provide you a smooth ride.
Here they are:
1. Xero Integration
Xero is an online accounting application that is helping small and medium-sized businesses to maintain accounts on the cloud-based server. This software as a service model has simplified accounting for varying businesses to avail a monthly subscription according to their requirements. It provides automatic synchronization of store data such as (Invoices, Credit Memos, Contacts, & Products) to your Xero account. It enables you to schedule the data export with a cron job. You can also update the records manually.
Features:
- Integrate Xero with your Magento store in few clicks
- Sync your Magento store Contacts to Xero application
- Inventory Management – Manage accurate & latest figures of store items
- Restrict duplication of invoices and credit memos
- Auto-update records in Xero account
- Cron job scheduling for updating the record
Pricing:
Xero Integration extension for Magento comes for $299.99 with an installation price of $50.
2. Blueshift Customer Data Activation Platform
Blueshift is the first-of-its-kind Customer Data Activation Platform (CDAP) that helps brands with intelligently scaling customer engagement across every channel and enabling marketing teams of all sizes to deliver 1:1, personalized experiences at scale. Brands with digital stores across virtually every vertical partner with Blueshift to make better use of their existing customer data and drive meaningful, tailored experiences that today’s customers crave.
Blueshift’s free, turnkey integration with Magento makes it simple for brands to sync historic and real-time catalog, transaction, and user behavior data from their online stores to Blueshift, and with the minimal implementation efforts needed. Brands can immediately start leveraging real-time customer behaviors from their website or online stores with Blueshift’s multi-channel personalization, behavior-targeting, and predictive capabilities to tailor, automate, and optimize each customer’s experiences. Data is always fresh and up-to-date with the latest customer activity and catalog data to power campaigns, allowing marketers to move fast and streamline workflows.
Features:
- Integrate all your first-party eCommerce data in a few minutes such as product catalog data, purchase history, visitor activity, page visits, transactions, and user data.
- Synchronize past and new orders in real-time such as user behaviors like cart events, purchase events, and more from your digital store
- Build advanced segments leveraging all first-party and real-time data
- Utilize customer subscription management to prevent sending unwanted marketing messages
Pricing:
Blueshift pricing is customized to each website. Pricing is based on a number of factors including:
- The edition you select
- The number of active monthly users on your website or app
- Support tier selected
- The number of messages sent per month
3. Unbxd
Unbxd is an AI-powered e-commerce product discovery tool that allows you to personalize and contextualize product recommendations to your customers enhancing their shopping experience on your store and resulting in more conversions for you. Unbxd also helps stores to keep track of their inventory in terms of new additions, deletions, or any incremental change in the product description. The extension pushes the feed to the Unbxd servers and transforms your website’s catalog into searchable data.
Features:
- Automatic catalog sync for addition or deletion of products
- High-speed indexing of your catalog
- Logging system helps you look up items in the indexing queue
- Analytics integration creates unique shopper profile and boosts personalization
- Easy search integration provides a full set of UI/UX libraries to help you build a search interface with a default template instantly.
Pricing:
Unbxd doesn’t disclose it’s pricing on its website, however, it does offer a 21-day free trial.
4. Searchanise Smart
Searchanise is an advanced smart search & upselling tool for your Magento e-commerce business. Searchanise Smart Search Autocomplete allows you to easily replace your default Magento search with advanced relevant autocomplete search for products, categories, and content pages, with instant search suggestions as-you-type, typo-correction, and personalization. Searchanise improves your customers’ journey with a search bar, customizable product filters, and recommendation upselling blocks.
Features:
- Search-as-You-Type: Personalized search suggestions, search autocomplete.
- Search through products, collections, and content pages.
- Live price, in-stock status, and product previews.
- Spellcheck and typo correction.
- “Did you mean” suggestions if nothing is found, Keyword-based redirects, Synonym dictionary, Stop-words.
- Autocomplete search for products, categories, and content pages
- Search suggestions as-you-type
- Typo-correction
- Personalization
- Product filters
- Upselling recommendation blocks
Pricing:
For stores with up to 25 products, Searchanise offers FREE Product search feature and other basic features. For the creation of a marketplace or a bigger stores, a nominal subscription cost of $9/month is applicable.
5. Ideal Postcodes UK Address Search & Postcode Lookup
Ideal Postcodes provides address autocomplete and postcode lookup (for the UK address database) for your Magento address forms. For the UK shop owners, Ideal postcodes can speed up checkout, increase deliverability, and ensure that correct addresses are collected, thereby reducing cart abandonment.
This extension adds address validation including realtime address autocompletion and postcode lookup on your address forms. These tools appear on your checkout and user account pages (for billing and shipping addresses).
Features:
- Address auto-completion and validation (UK database)
- Postcode lookup (UK database)
Pricing:
Ideal Postcodes comes in three different plans:
- Standard (2.5p/per lookup),
- Mid Tier (2.25p/per lookup) and
- High Volume (2p/per lookup)
6. ClickSend SMS
ClickSend is a B2B communications software that provides Magento stores with the ability to easily send and receive SMS, Email, Voice, Rich Media, and even Post worldwide via web app or API, at scale. Whether it’s transactional SMS messages at scale via API or multi-channel marketing campaigns via the web app, ClickSend allows businesses to engage their customers and staff on their preferred channels using a single platform.
Features:
- This extension allows you to send SMS automatically using the ClickSend.com platform.
- Send SMS to your customers when an order is shipped.
- Send SMS to yourself when a new order is placed.
- It allows you to use placeholders in the SMS.
- Set the form name/number of the message.
Pricing:
ClickSend extension is free to use, however, charges may apply and vary depending on the location, quantity, and type of SMS service. Pricing starts at $0.008 / SMS.
7. Super Monitoring
Super Monitoring is a remote website monitoring service. It monitors your store 24/7 for its uptime, speed, and proper functioning. You get notified with an email or SMS instantly if there is any malfunction or outage in your system. Super monitoring is an important tool to have on your e-commerce store so that you never face any downtime.
With this tool, you can also analyze your uptime and performance with historical reports. Or browse through the history of your website’s uptime, check details of any event, download screenshots, HTML snapshots, HTTP headers, or HAR files for root cause analysis.
Features:
- Unavailability Detection (uptime monitoring)
- Performance Check (response time monitoring)
- Content Verifying (phrase matching)
- Form Testing (filling in, submitting and verifying the response)
- Page Speed Monitoring (full-page loading time measuring)
- Process Testing (scenario-based transaction monitoring)
- File Integrity Monitoring (checksum matching)
- Immediate Alerts (email & SMS)
- History And Reports (including screenshots, HTML snapshots, HTTP headers and more)
- Unlimited Alert Recipients and Sub-Accounts
- Integrations & API
- Multilingual interface (English, Spanish, German & Polish).
Pricing:
The extension requires a Super Monitoring account (trial or commercial). The subscription plans start at $5.99, see detailed pricing.
8. Extra Fee Pro
Extra Fee extension for Magento 2 allows adding extra charges for additional services like gift wrap, packing charges, insurance, etc. With Extra Free Pro, you can easily display these additional charges on the cart and checkout page, order, invoice, credit memo, sales emails, and PDF.
The admin can add extra charges either by percentage price or fixed price fees. Further, there are loads of options available to create additional charges, i.e., additional charges based on — shipping methods, shipping addresses, product subselection, cart attributes, gift wrap, and so on. You can also configure ‘Refundable’ and ‘Non-refundable’ attributes for your extra fees.
Features:
- Enable or disable extension from the admin configuration
- Available fee type: Fixed price, Percentage price
- Apply extra fee for a specific store and customer group
- Enable or disable refund of extra fees
- Appy extra fee on admin order creation
- Support multi-currency and multi-store
- Support tax calculation on the extra fees
- Select tax class for the extra fees
- Admin can set the sort order of extra fee
- Create multiple cart and product attributes conditions
- Assign extra fee for specific shipping method
- Create condition for specific postcode, region, state and country
- Assign extra fee for the specific product, category or product attributes
- Show extra fees on order, invoice, credit memo, sales emails, and PDF
Pricing:
Extra fee pro comes at a upfront price of $39.
9. Paytrace Payment
PayTrace is a payment gateway provider that provides secure servers and anti-fraud measures for credit card payments on your Magento store. The data is stored within a 3 Tier high-security data center and is provided with end-to-end encrypted card readers. It also delivers customer profile storage with no extra charge and top-notch security in the PCI compliant database. This extension specializes in B2B transactions and is one of the few payment gateway providers that can process Level II and III credit card data. Founded in 2004, PayTrace has been PCI validated since 2005.
Features:
- Comprehensive transaction processing
- Level II & III data
- Credit card processing
- Minimize PCI Scope
- Secure checkout
- Free tokenization
- Encrypted card readers
- Client-side encryption
- The secure customer storage vault
- Protects customer data
- Assigns custom tokens
- Eliminates on-site storage
- Reduces liability and PCI scope
Pricing:
On PayTrace’s website, There are three different package plans to choose from:
- The Basic plan is intended for small eCommerce businesses.
- The Pro plan can accommodate larger online businesses but is also tailored to the needs of B2B merchants.
- The Cash Advance plan is a specialized plan that’s only available to qualified financial institutions.
NOTE: PayTrace doesn’t disclose it’s pricing and holds dynamic quotes.
10. Queue-it Virtual Waiting Room
Queue-it is the first virtual waiting room software-as-a-service and is how businesses prevent website or app crashes from high traffic.
When traffic exceeds your site’s capacity, visitors are redirected to an online queue and then passed back to your website or app in a controlled first-come, first-served order.
Full control over traffic inflow to your site gives you an added layer of protection against bots and abuse.
Queue-it’s virtual waiting room helps you:
- Capture sales otherwise lost to downtime
- Prevent bots and abuse from accessing your site
- Ensure fairness with a first-in-first-out wait for genuine visitors
- Deliver a branded wait & seamless user experience
You can integrate Queue-it easily and reliably:
- Implement Queue-it in front of the entire site, landing page, or key bottlenecks like “Add to Cart” or payment gateways
- Integrate with a client-side, server-side, edge, or native app connectors with all major programming languages including a dedicated Magento extension
- Use under a day to complete the one-time integration
- Avoid making any DNS changes and rest assured no sensitive data passes through Queue-it
Pricing:
Queue-it’s subscription and pricing is usage-based, with no up-front cost and several plan tiers and billing intervals.
11. Okiano Marketing
Okiano is a Google Ads automation tool. It uses AI to automate the creation of Google Ads from your website product content and category structure and then upload these Ads to Google AdWords creating a campaign that can be managed by you or by the automated AI system.
The extension collects all of your Site catalog information including categories, products and attributes, and product description. You can use the Okiano Extension when you want to start a Google Ads campaign from scratch or when you want to augment your existing campaign with fresh Ads and new Keywords.
Features:
- Creative Magic: Great-looking ads but automatic. A/B test available to yield the best results.
- Smart Keywords: Generates relevant keywords with little search volume according to your catalog.
- Campaign Builder: Builds perfect campaigns in Google Ads (AdWords). Okiano Campaign Builder is using the Ads created by our Creative Magic and the search terms created by Smart Keywords to construct excellent AdWords campaigns maintaining the important relevancy of the Keyword→Ad→Landing page sequence, creating Search Campaigns that work from the start.
- Sales Amplifier: Sophisticated re-marketing and re-targeting, identification of new keywords derived from user searches, and associating them to the Ads and landing pages and automatically generating new Ads are all means to increase your sales and scale your business in a competitive landscape.
- Shopping Booster: Automatically creating Google Shopping campaigns that work. Continuously preparing your products to comply with the requirements and match to the right categories to meet relevant user searches identifying intent to purchase and optimizing to keep your performance at peak.
- Budget Optimizer: Okiano Budget Optimizer manages your Google Ad budget to the level of your store category structure. This helps you choose categories and product groups that will be included or excluded as per your business preference and Okiano will manage your store Search Ads budget accordingly.
Pricing:
The extension is free to install. Additional fees may apply for the service (not the extension) depending on the service bundle you choose. Here is a link to the Okiano pricing page.
12. Advanced Order Management
With the excellent Magento 2 Advanced Order Management extension, administrators can view and modify orders directly from the grid. The admin can perform modifications to update the order information like order status, etc. directly from the Sales Order Grid.
Using this Advanced Order Management extension you can quickly send an invoice, shipment, notify customers, archive the orders, and so on directly from the sales order grid. The applications of this extension are many. It will come in handy to generate invoices, in supporting customers with order queries, monitoring bulk orders at once, etc.
Features:
- View Purchased Product detail directly from the Order Grid
- View Order billing, shipping detail directly from the Order Grid
- View Customer Information Directly from the Order Grid
- Admin can mass ship, mass invoice, mass (ship+invoice), mass (ship+capture) online, mass (ship+invoice) offline from the grid
- Admin can mass archive order, mass invoice, mass ship+invoice, mass ship+capture(offline), mass ship+capture(online), mass archive orders
- Notify customers directly from the Grid
- View, order special custom note on the order Grid
- Admin can view, search products and it’s options directly in the Grid
Pricing:
Advanced Order Management comes for a price of $59 with an installation charge of $50.
13. 3DVieweronline
3DVieweronline is a web platform that allows users to upload 3D models and easily share them through the 3D Viewer. The platform can be embedded in websites or online catalogs and can be viewed on any device. Even mobile devices can use the 3D Viewer and the suite of tools that comes with it.
The 3D Viewer extension allows you to easily embed 3D models into your Magento website. Whether you are selling consumer electronics or B2B products, the 3D Viewer will generate much more user engagement than pictures or technical drawings, boosting your conversions and the confidence in your products.”
Features:
- Easy to use: No programming skills are required. Embedding the 3D Viewer is as easy as embedding a YouTube video.
- Works on every device: The 3D Viewer has a responsive layout and works beautifully on computers, tablets, and smartphones. Based on WebGL it runs directly on the browser, no plugins or other software is required.
- Customizable: The 3D Viewer layout can be deeply customized to match your website style for a seamless integration.
- Realistic: The 3D Viewer allows you to increase the realism of any 3D model by easily changing the scene settings.
- Private and safe: All your data is processed with a 256-bit secure encrypted connection.
- API: REST-APIs are provided for a deeper integration.
Pricing:
The Regular Account of 3DVieweronline comes for free. However, it also offers two premium versions: Premium Account and Business Account, which allows more model dimension, upload files, and various other features.
3DVieweronline also offers a 14-days trial upon registration to let you fully test the 3D Viewer features and performance.
Conclusion
These were a few Magento extensions that can help you simplify, automate, and enhance your business operations online. However, it is not to forget that the web is bulging with cyber threats. Hence, with added functionalities like the ones we mentioned above, it is equally (if not more) important to protect your store and customers from hackers. Security extensions such as Astra Security works wonders in protecting an e-commerce store. With its suite of security tools that include – a firewall, on-demand malware scanner, immediate malware cleanup, and several other features keep you protected round the clock. Astra installs as an extension on your Magento store and is compatible with all Magento versions.