Running an e-commerce Store is a lucrative dream for many. However, what remains largely unknown to the average audience is what goes into running an online store efficiently. If you’re someone who wants to shift your business online on Magento or have already built one, this post is for you.

Magento, as you would know, is one of the leading e-commerce website building platforms, founded in 2008, now owned by Adobe. Of all the features that Magento provides, the one thing that sets Magento apart is its extensions and modules.

There are thousands of Magento extensions and modules available, but to simplify things and help you set up your store quickly, we have listed the best 11 for you. All these extensions cover different areas of your online business and collectively provide you a smooth ride. 

Here they are:

1. Xero Integration

Xero is an online accounting application that is helping small and medium-sized businesses to maintain accounts on the cloud-based server. This software as a service model has simplified accounting for varying businesses to avail a monthly subscription according to their requirements. It provides automatic synchronization of store data such as (Invoices, Credit Memos, Contacts, & Products) to your Xero account. It enables you to schedule the data export with a cron job. You can also update the records manually.

Features:

• Integrate Xero with your Magento store in few clicks
• Sync your Magento store Contacts to Xero application 
• Inventory Management – Manage accurate & latest figures of store items
• Restrict duplication of invoices and credit memos
• Auto-update records in Xero account
• Cron job scheduling for updating the record

Pricing:

Xero Integration extension for Magento comes for $59 with an installation price of $50.

2. Blueshift Customer Data Activation Platform

Blueshift is the first-of-its-kind Customer Data Activation Platform (CDAP) that helps brands with intelligently scaling customer engagement across every channel and enabling marketing teams of all sizes to deliver 1:1, personalized experiences at scale. Brands with digital stores across virtually every vertical partner with Blueshift to make better use of their existing customer data and drive meaningful, tailored experiences that today’s customers crave.

Blueshift’s free, turnkey integration with Magento makes it simple for brands to sync historic and real-time catalog, transaction, and user behavior data from their online stores to Blueshift, and with the minimal implementation efforts needed. Brands can immediately start leveraging real-time customer behaviors from their website or online stores with Blueshift’s multi-channel personalization, behavior-targeting, and predictive capabilities to tailor, automate, and optimize each customer’s experiences. Data is always fresh and up-to-date with the latest customer activity and catalog data to power campaigns, allowing marketers to move fast and streamline workflows.

Features:

• Integrate all your first-party eCommerce data in a few minutes such as product catalog data, purchase history, visitor activity, page visits, transactions, and user data.
• Synchronize past and new orders in real-time such as user behaviors like cart events, purchase events, and more from your digital store
• Build advanced segments leveraging all first-party and real-time data
• Utilize customer subscription management to prevent sending unwanted marketing messages

Pricing:

Blueshift pricing is customized to each website. Pricing is based on a number of factors including:

• The edition you select
• The number of active monthly users on your website or app
• Support tier selected
• The number of messages sent per month

3. Searchanise Smart

Searchanise is an advanced smart search & upselling tool for your Magento e-commerce business. Searchanise Smart Search Autocomplete allows you to easily replace your default Magento search with advanced relevant autocomplete search for products, categories, and content pages, with instant search suggestions as-you-type, typo-correction, and personalization. Searchanise improves your customers’ journey with a search bar, customizable product filters, and recommendation upselling blocks.

Features:

• Search-as-You-Type: Personalized search suggestions, search autocomplete.
• Search through products, collections, and content pages.
• Live price, in-stock status, and product previews.
• Spellcheck and typo correction.
• “Did you mean” suggestions if nothing is found, Keyword-based redirects, Synonym dictionary, Stop-words.
• Autocomplete search for products, categories, and content pages 
• Search suggestions as-you-type
• Typo-correction 
• Personalization
• Product filters
• Upselling recommendation blocks

Pricing:

For stores with up to 25 products, Searchanise offers FREE Product search feature and other basic features. For bigger stores, a nominal subscription cost of $9/month is applicable.

4. Ideal Postcodes UK Address Search & Postcode Lookup

Ideal Postcodes provides address autocomplete and postcode lookup (for the UK address database) for your Magento address forms. For the UK shop owners, Ideal postcodes can speed up checkout, increase deliverability, and ensure that correct addresses are collected, thereby reducing cart abandonment. 

This extension adds address validation including realtime address autocompletion and postcode lookup on your address forms. These tools appear on your checkout and user account pages (for billing and shipping addresses).

Features:

• Address auto-completion and validation (UK database)
• Postcode lookup (UK database)

Pricing:

Ideal Postcodes comes in three different plans: 

1. Standard (2.5p/per lookup), 
2. Mid Tier (2.25p/per lookup) and 
3. High Volume (2p/per lookup)

5. ClickSend SMS

ClickSend is a B2B communications software that provides Magento stores with the ability to easily send and receive SMS, Email, Voice, Rich Media, and even Post worldwide via web app or API, at scale. Whether it’s transactional SMS messages at scale via API or multi-channel marketing campaigns via the web app, ClickSend allows businesses to engage their customers and staff on their preferred channels using a single platform.

Features:

• This extension allows you to send SMS automatically using the ClickSend.com platform.
• Send SMS to your customers when an order is shipped.
• Send SMS to yourself when a new order is placed.
• It allows you to use placeholders in the SMS.
• Set the form name/number of the message.

Pricing:

ClickSend extension is free to use, however, charges may apply and vary depending on the location, quantity, and type of SMS service. Pricing starts at $0.008 / SMS.

6. Super Monitoring

Super Monitoring is a remote website monitoring service. It monitors your store 24/7 for its uptime, speed, and proper functioning. You get notified with an email or SMS instantly if there is any malfunction or outage in your system. Super monitoring is an important tool to have on your e-commerce store so that you never face any downtime.

With this tool, you can also analyze your uptime and performance with historical reports. Or browse through the history of your website’s uptime, check details of any event, download screenshots, HTML snapshots, HTTP headers, or HAR files for root cause analysis.

Features:

• Unavailability Detection (uptime monitoring)
• Performance Check (response time monitoring)
• Content Verifying (phrase matching)
• Form Testing (filling in, submitting and verifying the response)
• Page Speed Monitoring (full-page loading time measuring)
• Process Testing (scenario-based transaction monitoring)
• File Integrity Monitoring (checksum matching)
• Immediate Alerts (email & SMS)
• History And Reports (including screenshots, HTML snapshots, HTTP headers and more)
• Unlimited Alert Recipients and Sub-Accounts
• Integrations & API
• Multilingual interface (English, Spanish, German & Polish).

Pricing:

The extension requires a Super Monitoring account (trial or commercial). The subscription plans start at $5.99, see detailed pricing.

7. Extra Fee Pro

Extra Fee extension for Magento 2 allows adding extra charges for additional services like gift wrap, packing charges, insurance, etc. With Extra Free Pro, you can easily display these additional charges on the cart and checkout page, order, invoice, credit memo, sales emails, and PDF.

The admin can add extra charges either by percentage price or fixed price fees. Further, there are loads of options available to create additional charges, i.e., additional charges based on — shipping methods, shipping addresses, product subselection, cart attributes, gift wrap, and so on. You can also configure ‘Refundable’ and ‘Non-refundable’ attributes for your extra fees. 

Features:

• Enable or disable extension from the admin configuration
• Available fee type: Fixed price, Percentage price
• Apply extra fee for a specific store and customer group
• Enable or disable refund of extra fees
• Appy extra fee on admin order creation
• Support multi-currency and multi-store
• Support tax calculation on the extra fees
• Select tax class for the extra fees
• Admin can set the sort order of extra fee
• Create multiple cart and product attributes conditions 
• Assign extra fee for specific shipping method
• Create condition for specific postcode, region, state and country
• Assign extra fee for the specific product, category or product attributes
• Show extra fees on order, invoice, credit memo, sales emails, and PDF

Pricing:

Extra fee pro comes at a upfront price of $39.

8. Paytrace Payment

PayTrace is a payment gateway provider that provides secure servers and anti-fraud measures for credit card payments on your Magento store. The data is stored within a 3 Tier high-security data center and is provided with end-to-end encrypted card readers. It also delivers customer profile storage with no extra charge and top-notch security in the PCI compliant database. This extension specializes in B2B transactions and is one of the few payment gateway providers that can process Level II and III credit card data. Founded in 2004, PayTrace has been PCI validated since 2005.

Features:

• Comprehensive transaction processing
• Level II & III data
• Credit card processing
• Minimize PCI Scope
• Secure checkout
• Free tokenization
• Encrypted card readers
• Client-side encryption
• The secure customer storage vault
• Protects customer data
• Assigns custom tokens
• Eliminates on-site storage
• Reduces liability and PCI scope

Pricing:

On PayTrace’s website, There are three different package plans to choose from:

1. The Basic plan is intended for small eCommerce businesses.
2. The Pro plan can accommodate larger online businesses but is also tailored to the needs of B2B merchants.
3. The Cash Advance plan is a specialized plan that’s only available to qualified financial institutions.

NOTE: PayTrace doesn’t disclose it’s pricing and holds dynamic quotes.

9. Queue-it Virtual Waiting Room

Queue-it is a virtual waiting room platform developed to control website and app traffic surges by offloading visitors to a waiting line environment. Its SaaS platform enables ecom­merce companies across the globe to keep systems online and visi­tors informed, capturing key sales revenue and activity during campaigns, flash sales, product launches, and limited collection releases.

Online queues are set up within the virtual waiting room platform to handle end-users who exceed your infrastructure’s capacity. These end-users are first redirected to a virtual waiting room and then passed back to the website or app in a first-come, first-served order. The Queue-it platform is operated in a web-based admin interface that allows IT professionals to control the queue configuration and monitor real-time analytics of peak traffic.

Features:

• Traffic peaks control 
• Minimize lost orders or app downtime
• Provide a fair experience to your shoppers
• 24/7 traffic monitoring
• Handle the hype during a high-interest sale, event, or launch using pre-queues: 
• Get premium reporting
• Administrate multiple users (new and existing)
• Get email notifications & logs of all changes
• Load testing

Pricing:

Queue-it’s subscription and pricing is usage-based, with no up-front cost and several plan tiers and billing intervals.

10. Okiano Marketing

Okiano is a Google Ads automation tool. It uses AI to automate the creation of Google Ads from your website product content and category structure and then upload these Ads to Google AdWords creating a campaign that can be managed by you or by the automated AI system.

The extension collects all of your Site catalog information including categories, products and attributes, and product description. You can use the Okiano Extension when you want to start a Google Ads campaign from scratch or when you want to augment your existing campaign with fresh Ads and new Keywords.

Features:

• Creative Magic: Great-looking ads but automatic. A/B test available to yield the best results.
• Smart Keywords: Generates relevant keywords with little search volume according to your catalog.
• Campaign Builder: Builds perfect campaigns in Google Ads (AdWords). Okiano Campaign Builder is using the Ads created by our Creative Magic and the search terms created by Smart Keywords to construct excellent AdWords campaigns maintaining the important relevancy of the Keyword→Ad→Landing page sequence, creating Search Campaigns that work from the start.
• Sales Amplifier: Sophisticated re-marketing and re-targeting, identification of new keywords derived from user searches, and associating them to the Ads and landing pages and automatically generating new Ads are all means to increase your sales and scale your business in a competitive landscape.
• Shopping Booster: Automatically creating Google Shopping campaigns that work. Continuously preparing your products to comply with the requirements and match to the right categories to meet relevant user searches identifying intent to purchase and optimizing to keep your performance at peak.
• Budget Optimizer: Okiano Budget Optimizer manages your Google Ad budget to the level of your store category structure. This helps you choose categories and product groups that will be included or excluded as per your business preference and Okiano will manage your store Search Ads budget accordingly.

Pricing:

The extension is free to install. Additional fees may apply for the service (not the extension) depending on the service bundle you choose. Here is a link to the Okiano pricing page.

11. Advanced Order Management

With the excellent Magento 2 Advanced Order Management extension, administrators can view and modify orders directly from the grid. The admin can perform modifications to update the order information like order status, etc. directly from the Sales Order Grid.

Using this Advanced Order Management extension you can quickly send an invoice, shipment, notify customers, archive the orders, and so on directly from the sales order grid. The applications of this extension are many. It will come in handy to generate invoices, in supporting customers with order queries, monitoring bulk orders at once, etc.

Features:

• View Purchased Product detail directly from the Order Grid
• View Order billing, shipping detail directly from the Order Grid
• View Customer Information Directly from the Order Grid
• Admin can mass ship, mass invoice, mass (ship+invoice), mass (ship+capture) online, mass (ship+invoice) offline from the grid
• Admin can mass archive order, mass invoice, mass ship+invoice, mass ship+capture(offline), mass ship+capture(online), mass archive orders
• Notify customers directly from the Grid
• View, order special custom note on the order Grid
• Admin can view, search products and it’s options directly in the Grid

Pricing:

Advanced Order Management comes for a price of $59 with an installation charge of $50.

Conclusion

These were a few Magento extensions that can help you simplify, automate, and enhance your business operations online. However, it is not to forget that the web is bulging with cyber threats. Hence, with added functionalities like the ones we mentioned above, it is equally (if not more) important to protect your store and customers from hackers. Security extensions such as Astra Security works wonders in protecting an e-commerce store. With its suite of security tools that include – a firewall, on-demand malware scanner, immediate malware cleanup, and several other features keep you protected round the clock. Astra installs as an extension on your Magento store and is compatible with all Magento versions.