As per industry facts, there are more than 1, 50,000 Magento stores across the globe, and this trendy eCommerce platform is being used by start-ups to well-established brands like Samsung. With its rich features, Magento has become the preferred eCommerce solution for the majority of online store owners, however for a successful and feature-rich eCommerce application, the default community version of Magento should be updated with popular add-ons.
After researching many successful eCommerce sites and analyzing the effects of the popular extensions on the performance of an eCommerce store, I have selected a few extensions which are a must for any Magento shop.
Users never prefer long checkout processes. Nowadays, the online stores are being browsed a lot on mobile phones and users prefer smarter checkout process for easy checkout. The new Smart Checkout extension helps in overcoming the complex steps of order and payment procedure that could lead your customers to leave your store without checking out properly.
Social media cannot be ignored for a while when we are talking about enhancing the performance of the Magento Store for better revenue. The social media channels help in driving considerable traffic to your eCommerce website. Therefore, the Social Network Integration Bundle extension is built for allowing convenient and faster integration of social media icons on your online store. With the help of these icons, the visitors can easily share the content over your website in their circles, which ultimately helps in pouring more visitors to your site.
You can easily select which social media icons to include on your online store with the help of this Social Network Integration Bundle extension. You can also integrate the social buttons depending on the features of the social media sites such as connect, like, tweet, share, comment, and follow.
If targeted marketing campaigns are considered as successful ways of driving traffic to an online store, then the Magento stores can use Bronto extension, which helps the Magento store owners in driving significant traffic to their online store via targeted marketing campaigns. You can easily bring in the past purchase data consisting of the product details and complete order history with the help of this extension that can be used for creating effective lifecycle marketing campaigns for converting the first time buyers into your loyal customers.
This free extension of Magento not only integrates the “rel” canonical URL to the head of your web pages but it also lets you set the custom canonical links for all your products.
Moreover, this extension also assists the search engines to find the relevant web pages of your eCommerce store against specific search queries performed by your target audience. In general, this extension helps in improving the search engine ranks of your Magento store, which is necessary for driving traffic to your website.
Another vital Magento extension that helps in improving the overall performance and sales of your Magento store is XML Map creator, which allows convenient establishment and development of various XML sitemaps for your eCommerce site. Besides being simple to use, you can use this extension for submitting the newly created pages of your Magento store in the sitemap submission areas of Google and Bing webmasters.
Submitting the pages will allow these webmasters to analyze your website in-depth and also to crawl it better, which will potentially improve the amount of web pages indexed in the search engines thus increasing the chances of better traffic on your site.
As its name suggests, this extension offers profound abilities of Google Analytics to the Magento store owners
With this, you can easily keep a track of the conversions and Adwords purchases on your site. You can also evaluate how Adwords are generating conversions on your website. Moreover, it can also track each page of your eCommerce site, which includes the sections reclaimed through AJAX in one-page checkout.
Google Shopping API allows the developers or the back-end operators to upload and manage the products and important catalog information conveniently on the Magento store.
Thus, it helps in enhancing the visibility of your catalog information and products and it also ensures that your online store can perform better on search engines by helping developers to define the products, which will be sent to Google.
It is very common to delete products by mistake while handling your Magento store. With thousands of products to manage, it becomes sometimes hectic to concentrate on each product while uploading details and hence, often the product gets deleted from your store by fault. The Trashcan extension is meant to solve these types of problems only. It does exactly what you expect when you delete some important product from the backend of your website unknowingly.
This extension acts as a life saver when you do have not sufficient time for reloading the deleted products because this extension works similar to recycle bins on our desktops and laptops. It puts the deleted product in the recycle bin and you can easily store the product from there whenever it is required. This Magento extension keeps all the deleted products in the admin interface giving you the liberty of restoring the product as per your need.
The importance of a blog in driving leads and sales to your eCommerce store is worth mentioning. Blogs are the best way of improving user engagement on your online store, which is ultimately important for converting leads into sales.
This extension can be used as a great way to connect and communicate with your customers and this Magento connect extension makes it convenient for you to integrate a blog on your online store. You can also integrate your old blog with the latest one with the help of this extension.
For online store owners, sending follow-up emails play an important role in improving the overall traffic on their website. It is necessary to keep in touch with your existing customers. The Follow-up Emails extension by aheadWorks is a powerful auto-responder Magento add-on that allows you to reach your existing customers or target audience by sending them to follow emails related to your products and orders.
This extension also helps in maintaining a long-term relationship with the existing and past customers and it can easily be added to your Magento store.
These are the ten incredible extensions that I have chosen depending on their usefulness to the merchants as well to the customers. However, if you have any more lifesaving Magento extensions that can help in augmenting the overall performance and sales of a Magento store, do share with us through your comments.