Best Magento store extensions to make ecommerce owners’ life easier

Different extensions are designed to solve different problems: some of them help avoid pain points in store migration, some are good because automate the process of running a large store, another extensions add functionality which is critical for optimal user experience. One way or another, ecommerce platform extensions eventually contribute to the sales growth or minimize the time spent on implementing some important changes.

We consulted best Magento extensions providers as well as several ecommerce sites in order to give you the list of extensions you may find great to install for your own store.  So here is what we have chosen:

Sweet Tooth: Sweet Tooth is a loyalty platform that allows ecommerce merchants to create a loyalty & rewards program for their store.  With Sweet Tooth you can reward your customers for purchases, or any actions they perform. Sharing products on social media, referring friends, writing product reviews, how long they’ve been a customer – anything!

As for today, over 3,500 merchants are using this extension in over 40 countries. On average, Sweet Tooth helps stores increase their sales by 15% using a rewards point loyalty program. Monthly subscription for Sweet Tooth starts at $58 per month.

Wiser: Magento extension for increasing sales through optimizing product pricing. It allows retailers to reprice automatically based on aggregated competitor and sales data. It’s easy to set a minimum price for items, compare prices, and reprice around the clock to stay competitive. WisePricer seamlessly syncs with Magento stores and allows retailers to consistently beat their competitors. It has an easy to use interface that can grow along with any online store as it scales up.

Some of the best features WisePricer can boast of are:

• monitoring and managing multiple online stores in one place
• instant discovery & automatic tracking of competitors and competing products
• automatic change of product prices through special filters and customizable
• pricing rules.

WisePricer is a paid extrension, and on magentocommerce.com  it enjoys rating 4.6 out of 5.

Advanced SEO Suite: allows to upgrade Magento in terms of SEO, it adjusts Magento store to the requirements of the search engines. Advanced SEO Suite relieves lots of headache connected with SEO for Magento and is recommended for those who would like to be sure their site is not going to be penalized for duplicate content or other problems ecommerce stores frequently suffer from. One of the greatest things is that the extension doesn’t require lots of help from developer’s side; among other features it provides there are:

• optimization of product and category page titles, descriptions and H1 headings
• user-friendly URLs creation (including generation of product URLs  by a certain template)
• 301 redirects for duplicates of home page, setting canonicals for product and category pages
• hiding some unnecessary pages from search engines in robots.txt file

Magento Debug: a free Magento extension that helps avoid many bugging issues with the Magento store  and will be of a great assistance for the developers. It is especially useful for those who are new to Magento or anybody who is looking for the information about how Magento really works. Users who have tried this extension, say it easily installs and runs smoothly on different versions of the platform.

This extension is rated 4.4/5 and enjoys a very high popularity score on magentocommerce.com.

Feedback from stores that have already tried different extensions is always valuable. DiscountFilterStore.com’s representative, Laura, shared the company’s experience listing the extensions which were incredibly helpful to make the migration of two ecommerce stores from antiquated platform to Magento a smooth and quick process.   

“Migrating sites so critical to our bottom-line, in so short a timeframe,
has given our team a unique appreciation for Magento’s best store
extensions. For our team, these extensions – and the reasons why we love them – include:

• Subscribe Pro: awesome support, competitively priced, fits our business model perfectly. They have great vision – a road map of planned continuous improvement.
• SearchSpring: one of the best vendors we have! The support is fantastic, product is stable and intuitive, and they have tools to help us measure the success of search on the site.
• Webshopapps Shipping Override: this has saved us money in custom development, allows us to have more control over ship methods, restrictions and business rules so we can react to issues or changes very quickly.
• Qubit Universal Variable: this free tool has saved us money in custom development, we can make changes to tags without pushing new code so it helps with site stability and allows us to make changes quickly.
• SEO Suite Ultimate: this has saved us a lot of money compared to developing SEO features on our own, they have support and a solid community of users to help with issues”.

Myessentia.com is an online store selling mattresses. The store is built on Magento  platform, but as company’s representative, Jason Wright, says, it’s not a typically looking Magento site, and a lot of efforts have been put to optimize Magento site to perfection. So below is the list of extensions they enjoyed using:

• Awesome Checkout: it is pretty amazing. Lots of web psychology went into the user experience in Awesome Checkout. Everything from checkmark approving your every step to Visual 3 step checkout. Geo location pulls in the city for them. Very well done overall.
• Special Promotionsby Amasty: nothing bores a customer more than having the same sales, week after week. Special Promotions allows you to create an endless amount of promos. BOGO, buy one get the other half off, spend X and get Y off. It’s endless.
• Abandoned Carts Alerts Pro:it sends an e-mail to someone who’s abandoned their cart. You can offer promos and friendly reminders. It has worked wonders.

Hope, this information was helpful and you have got an idea of what kind of extension you would like to try for your Magento store. Probably, there are some extensions you were happy to use for your site, then feel free to recommend them in the comments below!