10 Must-Have Magento Extensions for Your Online Store

The desire to be “in the game” is universal. If you agree, then you definitely want to maximize the efficiency of your e-commerce store. The most important Magento 2 extensions will help you improve your online promotion and website development in order to stay competitive and provide top-quality service to customers.

E-commerce platform Magento 2 provides merchants with the help they need to boost their sales and business globally. Learn about 10 must-have Magento 2 extensions that will enhance your site’s functionality so you can take advantage of the platform’s benefits.

The following are 10 must-have extensions that will make your e-commerce venture a success.

Ecommerce stores benefit from Magento’s advanced level features which make it the most popular eCommerce platform. With Magento, you have enough options out-of-the-box to meet most of your store’s needs. However, there may be times when you need custom functionalities that are not available in Magento. The role of extensions in such scenarios is crucial. Magento Connect (the Magento extension marketplace) has thousands of extensions that can add any imaginable functionality to your online store for this very reason.

What are Magento Extensions?

The Magento Extensions add functionality to the main application. Magento codes contain PHP-based features that enhance the capabilities of the online store. Actions on the website are handled through extensions both on the frontend and backend. Aside from storing database data, settings, action controllers, etc., they are also primary containers for some of the following.

What are the two ways of installing an extension in Magento 2?

Magento 2 Extensions can be installed in two ways:

• CLI-based Composer installation 
• Using the Web Setup Wizard to install

Magento Add-ons can also be installed via SSH.

What are the benefits of using Magento Extensions? 

With Magento Plugins (Extensions), retailers can become expert programmers or software developers without spending money on research or education. With the help of straightforward installation instructions, you will be able to integrate the enhanced features seamlessly into your online eCommerce store. The following benefits will be enjoyed by sellers as a result:

• Savings in financial terms
• Boost sales by improving your retail marketplace
• Enhance the competitiveness of your “online store”
• Provides buyers with a remarkable and brand-new online shopping experience.
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Any well-developed online store should have some of these popular Magento extensions. They cater to specific requirements, making your online store more customer-friendly and unique if you add them to it.

You can find them here:

1. Xero Integration

Xero is a cloud-based accounting solution that helps small and medium-sized businesses manage their accounts. With this software as a service model, varying businesses can subscribe according to their needs on a monthly basis. Store data such as invoices, credit memos, contacts, and products are automatically synchronized to your Xero account. Data exports can be scheduled using a cron job. Manually updating the records is also possible.

Features:

• Easy integration of Xero with Magento
• Connect your Magento store’s contacts to Xero 
• Managing store inventory – Maintain accurate & current figures
• Invoices and credit memos should not be duplicated
• Records in Xero are automatically updated
• Scheduling of cron jobs for updating records

Pricing information:

There is a cost of $299.99 for the Xero Integration extension for Magento, along with a $50 installation fee.

2. Blueshift Customer Data Activation Platform

With Blueshift, marketing teams of any size can deliver 1:1, personalized experiences across every channel and intelligently scale customer engagement across every channel. Across virtually all verticals, Blueshift partners with brands to maximize their existing customer data and deliver meaningful, tailored experiences.

Using Blueshift’s free, turnkey Magento integration, brands can synchronize historic and real-time catalog, transaction, and user behavior data from their online stores with minimal effort. With Blueshift’s multi-channel personalization, behavior-targeting, and predictive capabilities, brands can tailor, automate, and optimize customer experiences based on real-time customer behavior on their website or online store. Marketers can move quickly and streamline workflows with the latest customer activity and catalog data available to power campaigns.

These features include:

• In just a few minutes, you can integrate all your first-party eCommerce data, including product catalog data, purchase history, visitor activity, and page visits.
• Sync past and new orders from your digital store in real time, including cart events, purchase events, and more
• Utilize all first-party and real-time data to build advanced segments
• Prevent unwanted marketing messages by using customer subscription management

Pricing information:

Each Blueshift website has a customized pricing plan. A number of factors determine pricing, including:

• It depends on the edition you choose
• Your website or app’s monthly active users
• The support tier has been selected
• Monthly message volume

3. Unbxd

Using Unbxd, you can discover new products for your e-commerce store by contextualizing and personalizing product recommendations. This will improve your customers’ shopping experience and increase your conversions. Also, Unbxd helps stores keep track of inventory changes such as additions, deletions, or incremental changes to product descriptions. Unbxd transforms your website’s catalog into searchable data by pushing the feed to their servers.

Features:

• Additions and deletions of products automatically synced to the catalog
• Indexing of your catalog at high speed
• In the indexing queue, you can look up items using the logging system
• Integrating analytics creates a unique shopper profile and enhances personalization
• You can build a search interface with a default template instantly by using Easy search integration’s UI/UX libraries.

Pricing information:

Despite not disclosing its pricing on its website, Unbxd offers a free trial of 21 days.

4. Searchanise Smart

Your Magento e-commerce business needs a powerful smart search & upselling tool like Searchanise. Autocomplete functions, such as spelling suggestions, typo correction, and personalization, can be added to any Magento product, category, or content page with Searchanise Smart Search Autocomplete. With Searchanise, you can customize product filters, offer upselling recommendations, and improve customers’ journeys.

Features:

• Autocomplete and personalized search suggestions as you type.
• Browse through products, collections, and content.
• A live price, in-stock status, and a preview of the product are available.
• Correction of spelling and typos.
• If nothing is found, “Did you mean” suggestions, Keyword-based redirects, Synonym dictionary, Stop words.
• Product, category, and content page autocomplete 
• Type-as-you-search suggestions
• Correction of typos 
• Individualization
• Filters for products
• Blocks for upselling recommendations

Pricing information:

A FREE Product search feature and other basic features are available with Searchanise for stores with up to 25 products. Subscriptions for larger stores cost $9/month.

5. BSS Commerce’s Magento 2 Mega Menu

Using ClickSend, Magento stores can easily send and receive SMS, Emails, Voice, Rich Media, and even Post globally through web apps or APIs. Using ClickSend, businesses can engage their customers and staff on their preferred channels using a single platform, whether it be transactional SMS messages at scale or multi-channel marketing campaigns.

Features:

• By using ClickSend.com, you can send SMS automatically.
• Your customers will receive an SMS when their order has been shipped.
• When a new order is placed, send yourself an SMS.
• SMS placeholders can be used.
• The form name/number should be set.

Pricing information:

The ClickSend extension is free to use, but charges may apply based on location, quantity, and type of SMS service. SMS pricing starts at $0.008 per message.

7. Super Monitoring

The Super Monitoring service monitors websites remotely. You can monitor the speed, uptime, and proper functioning of your store 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If there is a malfunction or outage in your system, you are immediately notified via email or SMS. In order to avoid downtime in your e-commerce store, you need super monitoring.

Using this tool, you can also analyze your uptime and performance over time. For root cause analysis, you can browse through the history of your website’s uptime, view event details, download screenshots, HTML snapshots, HTTP headers, or HAR files.

Features:

• Monitoring of uptime (unavailability detection)
• Monitoring of response time (performance check)
• Verification of content (phrase matching)
• Testing forms (filling out, submitting, and verifying responses)
• Monitoring of page speed (measuring the time it takes for a page to load fully)
• Monitoring of scenarios-based transactions (process testing)
• Monitoring of file integrity (matching checksums)
• Email and SMS alerts (immediate)
• A history and reports section (with screenshots, HTML snapshots, HTTP headers, etc.)
• Sub-accounts and alert recipients are unlimited
• APIs and integrations
• An English, Spanish, German, and Polish interface is available.

Pricing information:

A Super Monitoring account (trial or commercial) is required to use the extension. See detailed pricing for subscription plans starting at $5.99.

8. Extra Fee Pro

Additional charges can be added for additional services such as gift wrapping, packing charges, insurance, etc. with the Extra Fee extension for Magento 2. Using Extra Free Pro, you can display these additional charges on the cart and checkout pages, orders, invoices, credit memos, and sales emails.

It is possible for the admin to add extra fees either in percentages or in fixed prices.

 In addition, there are many options for creating additional charges, such as based on shipping methods, shipping addresses, product subselections, cart attributes, gift wrap, etc. Your extra fees can also be configured as ‘Refundable’ or ‘Non-refundable’. 

Features:

• Admin configuration allows enabling or disabling extensions
• There are two types of fees available: fixed prices and percentages
• A specific store and customer group may be charged an additional fee
• Charges for extra services can be refunded or disabled
• The admin order creation fee should be applied
• Provide support for multiple currencies and stores
• Tax calculation on extra fees should be supported
• For extra fees, select the appropriate tax class
• Extra fees can be sorted by admin
• Multiple conditions can be created for carts and product attributes 
• Specify the shipping method and assign an extra fee
• Postcode, region, state, and country conditions can be created
• Add an extra fee for a specific product, category, or attribute of the product
• Add extra fees to orders, invoices, credit memos, and sales emails

Pricing information:

The upfront cost of Extra Fee Pro is $39.

9. Paytrace Payment

With PayTrace, you can accept credit cards on your Magento store using secure servers and anti-fraud measures. A 3 Tier high-security data center stores the data and provides end-to-end encrypted card readers. Furthermore, the PCI compliant database stores customer profiles without additional charge and provides top-notch security. One of the few payment gateway providers that can process Level II and III credit card data, this extension specializes in B2B transactions. As a PCI-validated company since 2005, PayTrace was founded in 2004.

Features:

• Processing of comprehensive transactions
• Data at Levels II and III
• Processing credit cards
• PCI scope should be minimized
• Checkout is secure
• Tokenization without charge
• Readers that encrypt cards
• Encryption on the client side
• Secure vault for customer data
• Data protection for customers
• Custom tokens are assigned
• Reduces on-site storage requirements
• PCI scope and liability are reduced

Pricing information:

You can choose from three different packages on PayTrace’s website:

1. Small eCommerce businesses will benefit from the Basic plan.
2. B2B merchants can also use the Pro plan, which is designed to accommodate larger online businesses.
3. Only qualified financial institutions are eligible for the Cash Advance plan.

PayTrace does not disclose its pricing and holds dynamic quotes.

10. Queue-it Virtual Waiting Room

In order to prevent website or app crashes as a result of high traffic, Queue-it developed the first virtual waiting room software-as-a-service.

A controlled first-come, first-served order is applied when traffic exceeds your site’s capacity.

Bots and abuse can be prevented if you have full control over traffic inflow to your site.

With Queue-it’s virtual waiting room, you can:

• Don’t let downtime cost you sales
• Don’t allow bots or abusers to access your site
• Make sure that genuine visitors wait in line first-in-first-out
• Provide seamless user experience with branded waits

Queue-it can be easily and reliably integrated:

• You can use Queue-it on any page on your site, such as the landing page, or on key bottlenecks like “Add to Cart” and payment gateways.
• Access all major programming languages, including a Magento extension, via client-side, server-side, edge, or native app connectors
• The one-time integration can be completed in under a day
• Queue-it does not transmit any sensitive data and no DNS changes are necessary

Pricing information:

There are several plan tiers and billing intervals available with Queue-it’s subscription and pricing model.

Conclusion

You can simplify, automate, and enhance your business operations online with these Magento extensions. We must not forget, however, that the web is filled with cyber threats. Therefore, with added functionalities like those mentioned above, it is equally (if not more) important to protect your store and customers from hackers. We offer a full suite of Magento development services, giving your e-commerce site a superior branded and user-centric experience that engages and delivers high ROI results. For more information connect with us.