Magento connect is the biggest eCommerce application marketplace in the world and hosts countless Magento extensions that help in enhancing user experience, social media integration, ecommerce analytics, administration tasks, shipment tracking, ERP integration, WordPress integration, Localization, language packs including German, French, Spanish and much more.
The extensions available on Magento connect and Magento marketplace are both free and paid, and most of the extensions can be used with both community as well as paid magneto subscription plans, though there are many extensions that are exclusive to specific Magento editions. Use of plug and play extensions ensure bug free setup and help save time and money that otherwise goes into custom development.
Talking a bit more about Magento, it is one of the best online store builder for medium and large-scale enterprises. The popularity and power of Magento can be gauged from the fact that organizations like Coca Cola, Burger King, Tom Dixon, Murad and Ncare use Magento for their online retail needs.
Community edition of Magento is the best option for individuals, small businesses and startups. It is also used widely by novices to experiment in the online market space without investing any money into building online stores.
Let us look at the best Magento extensions in terms of usage and popularity, we will cover free as well as paid extensions that help automate one or the other of the development, or setup tasks.
Note – Magento now has dedicated Magento marketplace which eventually will replace Magento connect. All the extensions included in this article link to Magento connect mainly, and in case the extension is available or moved to marketplace then the link will take you to Magento marketplace automatically.
1. eBay-Amazon-Rakuten-Magento Integration
When someone is in the game of selling products or services online, it is advisable to tap every potential marketplace out there in the wild. There are many ecommerce giants including the likes of Amazon, eBay and Rakuten that let brand owners sell their products on their platforms. However, the key pain area is the ability to sync the products availability and inventory control across all the platforms.
This extension kills this pain point by integrating Magento backend with eBay, Amazon & Rakuten marketplaces. The extension provides easy tools to help manage orders and the inventory details across all the channels.
2. WordPress Integration
Love Magento but can’t leave WordPress either? Well, you are not alone. You can integrate your WordPress blog with Magento, using this extension, within matter of minutes, since there is no need for any core file modification in both Magento or WordPress.
What I love about this extension is that it provides the option to use the same theme with WordPress as the Magento site, thus making the look and feel of the entire site uniform. The extension can also associate WordPress posts with Magento products.
3. Enhanced Admin Product Grid
Enhanced Admin Product Grid makes working with admin panel an absolute breeze. The extension gives you an option to add several usability features like product search, multiple row highlighting & selection, thumbnails in the catalog view and more.
Key features include –
- Product Search: It lets you search a product from the Magento admin just like a customer
- Row Highlighter: Multiple rows highlighting & selection allows you to select several rows and perform mass actions. This feature is a total time saver for an administrator.
- Thumbnails: Finding the right products is now easy and fast with this feature. Product thumbnails can be shown in the catalog view, making product discovery easy.
It also has features like Persistent Catalog Grid Settings, Mass Product Refresh, Quick Export, Custom Catalog Product Grid Columns and Date Created Column.
4. Shipment Tracking & Notifications Extension by AfterShip
AfterShip allows site owners to track the packages sent through UPS, DHL, FedEx & 350 other carriers. Using this extension, you can import tracking details of all your shipments in one place.
The design of the page can be customized to suit your Magento store design. The extension also lets you send status and delivery notification emails and SMS to your customers, to keep them informed and engaged.
This is one of the best Magento extensions and is compatible with Community, Enterprise as well as Go editions of Magento, you can sign up and start using the extension for free, they do charge additional for premium features, in case you opt to use.
5. MatrixRate – Multiple Table Rates Extension
This is one of the most downloaded shipping extensions out there and used by thousands of store owners. MatrixRate enables you to offer multiple shipping options to customers based on their locations. The shipping rates can also be defined based on the destination, shipping method, weight, price or quantity of the item.
The shipping prices can be customized based on the Zip codes filtering, it also supports Zip code ranges. You can easily setup the extension by following the neatly defined walkthrough examples that are given on the documentation page.
6. Searchanise: Search Autocomplete + Search Suggest
This is a must have extension for any Magento ecommerce website and helps improve the user experience. Searchanise provides instant search results as you type and shows all relevant products, categories, special offers and discounts in a single widget.
Another feature I love about this extension is its customization ability that allows you to easily customize it to fit to your site design. It enables smart search by adding “Did you mean” hints just like how Google provides hints for the misspelled words.
7. Remarkety Email Marketing
Email marketing is essential for any ecommerce business and almost every ecommerce business uses emails to promote products and to remind users of the products in their abandoned carts.
Remarkety makes designing emails and sending it to your subscribers very easy. It can be integrated with your store and can be used to segment users based on the products they purchased, products viewed, carts abandoned, and target them with segment specific emails.
8. One Step Checkout
Hassle free checkout means better conversion for any ecommerce store. OneStepCheckout is a widely used extension to simplify the checkout process. It simplifies the 6 native Magento checkout steps into one-page checkout.
It is easy to install and can be customized based on specific requirements of your Magento store.
9. AOE Scheduler
AOE scheduler allows for troubleshooting of long-running Magento cron jobs, and provides easy access to all the cron jobs setup on the Magento store setup.
AOE Scheduler makes it very easy to set up Cron tasks and keeps track of the created cron jobs, you can filter the cron jobs at a database level. It is advisable to go through all the documentation before implementing this extension, it needs to be carefully and properly configured to make it work.
10. Zopim Live Chat
Live chat improves the engagement between the online store and the store visitors and is an essential feature of any ecommerce site to make it more engaging and feel human. Zopim Live Chat extension integrates Zopim Live chat with your ecommerce website.
The installation and integration process is very quick and you can complete the whole process in a few minutes. You can also customize the design of the chat widget based on your site’s design. It has a great dashboard with saved chat history, template messages, visitor prioritization, Q & A and a smart responder.
Zopim Live chat is one of the best Magento extension for Chatting and worth checking out.
11. Google Shopping Feed
Now including your products to Google Shopping is easy with this Google Shopping Feed extension. The extension formats the feed based on the requirements from Google and makes integration process painless.
You can go through their documentation and training videos to understand more about this extension and easily integrate your products to Google.
12. EU Cookie Law Compliance
If your ecommerce site caters to the needs of European customers, then this is a must have extension for your site. Disclosing use of cookies on site is now a requirement and that is what this extension does. As soon as your visitors enter the site, the extension displays a notice to the visitors telling that this site uses cookies.
You can configure the extension to show the message in 7 different languages based on the location of the user. The design is pretty neat and fits in well without disturbing the visual appeal of the online store.
13. Speedster by Fooman
Page load speed is critical for the success of any website. Page Load speed has a direct impact on your visitors-to-sales conversion and SEO rankings. Any potential customer would leave a website within matter of seconds if it is sluggish and doesn’t load fast enough.
Speedster extension helps you speed up your online store by combining, compressing and caching JavaScript and CSS files, and hence reducing the total page size. It creates far future expires headers for the combined JavaScript and CSS files. It can also compress the files even without Gzip support on your server.
14. Magento Debug
Magento debug is an excellent tool for developers to monitor the total memory usage, script execution time and Magento configuration. Developers can request information like controller name, action name, cookies variables, session variables, GET and POST variables. Developers can also view the SQL queries executed for current request.
15. Google Universal Analytics
Analytics is a factor critical to the overall success of any ecommerce business. With Google Universal Analytics, you can easily add the Google Analytics code to your ecommerce website.
In the configuration, you can set whether the script needs to be inserted into the head or before the body end. It’s an excellent and an easy option to start tracking usage of your Magento store.
16. Related Products Manager
Displaying related products not only improves the cross-sell opportunity but also improves the visibility of products in the search engines. Related products manager uses already captured data about shopper activities and comes up with custom related items and up-sells from the entire catalogue.
You can also customize the related listing by adding manual suggestions on top of the existing curated related list for a product.
17. Facebook Connect and Like
“Facebook Connect and Like” extension lets you connect your store to Facebook. This makes your ecommerce site more social and uses the power of Facebook users to improve your sales.
This extension allows Facebook users to login to your site using their Facebook account, thus making the registration process very simple—no form filling required. It also adds a Like button on all the product pages.
18. Social Share
One of the best Magento extensions for social sharing, this extension adds Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ social share buttons to your ecommerce site. It has language support for English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch and 100 more languages.
You can select the social channels of your choice on the configuration page. For example, if you need to display just Facebook and Google + buttons, it can be done through the configuration page.
19. Beetailer – Social Commerce Platform
The needs of ecommerce users are changing fast and with the growing usage of social channels, it is very important for the ecommerce businesses to have a social promotion strategy.
Beetailer integrates your Magento store with Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and enables you to reach more social users and hence improve the sales. Users can browse and shop from within Facebook and checkout in your site using this extension.
There is no need to migrate your product data to Facebook as Beetailer takes care of the synchronization and makes sure all the stock information is same on Facebook and your site.
20. Locale_Mage_community_de_DE
The needs of ecommerce users are changing fast and with the growing usage of social channels, it is very important for the ecommerce businesses to have a social promotion strategy.
You need everything in German language, here is he extension for that. Locale Mage Community De DE translates the entire Magento Commerce interface into German language, it includes translation of TinyMCE Editor as well as email templates.
German Localization — Deutsches Sprachpaket inkl. Übersetzung des TinyMCE Editors und der eMailtemplates.
There are other similar extensions that do the translation in Spanish, French and other languages. Just do a search on Magento Connect or Marketplace and you will find out the best options with ratings from users’ community.
Conclusion
We have compiled this list of Top 20 Magento extensions based on our experience working with numerous ecommerce development projects and based on the ratings in MagentoConnect.
We would love to hear your feedback on the listed extensions, whether you found this list helpful, and do let us know if we have missed any extensions which important for ecommerce business.
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