The Best 6 Magento E-Commerce Extensions in 2020

Magento is an excellent platform that earned its place in the top 5 e-commerce shopping carts through its open-source technology, uncompromised speed, high-security features and an amazing SEO benefits that compliment digital marketing every step of the way.

While Magento remains one of the most popular and vibrant e-commerce platforms to partner with, there are ways where merchants can further increase their store’s performance, streamline its management and improve its user experience. In this article, we take the opportunity of sharing the top 6 Magento extensions that every Magento store owner needs to install for a cost-effective, self-sustaining and user-friendly online store.

Store Pickup

Often many online shoppers feel reluctant in ordering their products from stores that have warehouses and fulfillment centers located far apart from their location. This may involve legal, financial and administrative issues when shipping and delivering the product which creates an unnecessary hassle which the customer is not willing to afford.  A product might come from a different region where taxation laws applies, the time it takes may be more than the customer’s wait, no carriers available to deliver the order, or the shipping and delivery fee is too unaffordable. In this situation, it is up to the merchants to facilitate their customers and provide them with a feasible solution for getting their orders delivered without any obstacles. Magento 2 store pickup extension is just about it. This extension gives the customer the option to have the product delivered to a brand store nearest to the customer’s location, thereby saving time, money and peace of mind. Merchants can upload shop data using CSV files, create separate landing pages for each shop, and create location tags to filter listings.

Currency Switcher

Many online stores sell their products in other regions to target a greater market and generate higher revenues for their business. However, this comes with certain challenges when merchants sell to a local audience who has their regional preferences. One of the key aspects of local e-commerce is the currency which allows the online shopper to understand the value of the product and make a purchase decision. But since your store is from another country/region, your product price will appear in the native currency. To overcome this issue, you can install Auto Currency Switcher extension for your Magento store and convert all native currency into the local currency of your buyer’s region. The extension works by recognizing the buyer’s geo-location based on IP addresses and instantly change the product prices from foreign currency to local currency. You also benefit from other useful features such as rounding off prices, assign a specific currency to a region, create restrictions for users, and update the Maxmind Database from backend. The extension is the perfect solution to capture foreign markets and give customers great user experience.

GDPR Compliance

While you may already be aware of it, the GDPR law enforced in 2018 requires online merchants to pay close attention towards customer data, and the measures that are put in order to protect the data. For many online merchants this has led to dramatic changes in privacy policies and in the approaches to collect data when a visitor lands on their online store. GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation is a framework that defines the legal guidelines of gathering, collecting and processing data of visitors who land on any website within the jurisdiction of the European Union (EU). For Magento store owners it has become imperative to comply with these laws and get their stores optimized according to the specific guidelines of the law. But since this demands changes that are either too complicated to implement or too lengthy to process, many online merchants neglect its due importance and end up getting fined or closed down. With GDPR extension, merchants can easily get their store GDPR compliant without putting any dedicated effort on it. Once the extension is installed, the changes are automatically implemented and all the features of the store become compatible with the GDPR guidelines. This streamlines the website’s management tasks and gives it a positive rap for Google.

Flash Sales with Countdown Timer

Selling your last stock is not easy, especially when you have reached the 4th quarter and your leading products have mostly been sold out. Online merchants often come to this dilemma when they desperately need to close year-end sales and there isn’t any way bulk sell out the remaining stick without securing a profit margin. Customers want a product which they need and without a proper supply and demand strategy, you cannot expect to sell products on your store. To help stimulate sales at the end of the year, merchants must use ways to entice their customers and make the best of the ending year. Flash Sales and Countdown timer extension is a tool that allows you to automate all your left out stock and put exciting sales offers for customers to they are compelled to purchase your products. With this extension, you can build your own custom campaigns for year-end events such as Back-to-School, Black Friday, Christmas and other yearly festivals. You can also add a count-down timer so customer know these offers are for a limited time only. Other options allow you to set discounts on percentage or fixed amount, restrict flash sales to store views only, and show product sales labels on listings pages.

Efficient Order Export

Online merchants are known to struggle with exporting orders to get information and data about their products sold. This is usually done manually in a step by step process which is time consuming and does not generate the precise information required by the merchant.

Efficient Order Export extension is a convenient way of exporting invoices, shipment details, credit memo and product info, and any other order-related data which a third-party extension generates. With this module, you can easily generate an unlimited number of export profiles that are highly flexible and choose their output format as XML or CSV.

In advanced options, merchants can add certain conditions that will allow the extension to export orders with the data of specified products and their customer details. The information can be sent directly to the store owner’s email or uploaded it to the server. If the merchant needs the data every day, a profile can be created for exporting orders which sends the data directly to the merchant’s email once per day or any other time setting which suits the store owner’s preferences.

Ultimate SEO Optimizer

One of the most neglected aspects of online stores these days is proper search engine optimization. Many online merchants complain about their lack of engagement, store rankings, traffic, and conversions but fail to identify the only reason that is causing this depreciation. Moreover, with Google’s June update, online stores have to be more careful than ever in optimizing their online footprint to generate desired results. Since these optimizations require a lot of time, money and resources, online store owners feel reluctant in getting them done. But if you are a Magento store owner, things will start to look up for you because Ultimate SEO Pack can help you achieve all your SEO goals in one complete package. This extension is an all-in-one toolbox, that includes every SEO tool you need to transform your store according to Google’s standards.  With this extension, you can

• Generate SEO Optimized Alt Tags for Product Images
• Build XML & HTML Sitemaps for Store
• Add Extended Google Rich Snippet Tags
• Handle Content Language Duplicates with Hreflang Tags
• Add No Index No Follow Tags to Any Page
• Add Canonical Tags to Prevent Duplication

Final Takeaway

Well let’s wrap this up, these were the findings based on our personal experience, research and user reviews. These 6 extensions include functions and features are undoubtedly the most required in every online store. While there are many other extensions available in the market, these six define 2019’s needs and essentially supplement the factors that control an online store’ growth metrics. You can start by installing them one by one and optimizing them according to your Magneto store. Best of Luck!

Author Bio

Basim Butt is an E-Commerce Specialist with over 5 years of experience in Digital Media and is currently working at FME Extensions, a leading e-commerce web design and development agency. Over the years, FME Extensions has successfully delivered projects in Magento and other shopping cart platforms. You can find him on LinkedIn.