With so many awesome extensions on the Magento Connect store it's easier than ever to give your online shop an upgrade or two.
Here are five Magento extensions that will better your site's user experience and increase your return on investment (ROI).
Price: $0-$499/mo. (depending on features)
Product reviews are a really important factor in an online shopper's purchasing decision. Even more compelling is when there are lots of reviews and they come from trusted sources. Yotpo gets customers talking about your products, both on your website and through social media, and offers information about reviewers to add authenticity and trust.
Better still, Yotpo makes writing reviews super easy. After every purchase, your customers will get an email where they can write a quick review directly within the email message. Yotpo claims that you'll get reviews from 6-10 percent of your customers when using their service. Those numbers might not seem very big, but that's pretty impressive when it comes to product review rates.
Yotpo offers:
- free service for the Lite version and a free 30-day trial of the Premium service;
- customizable widgets to display reviews on your site;
- full customization of Mail After Purchase messages (emails to request reviews);
- review stars shown in Google search results;
- and ability to share reviews on Facebook and Twitter.
Price: $0-$500/mo. (depending on monthly site revenue)
Finding exactly what you're looking for in a well-stocked online shop can be tedious. Clicking through pages and pages of search results can become tiresome pretty quickly. Softcube's personalized recommendations show your customers exactly what they're looking for and create a pleasant, streamlined shopping experience.
Softcube offers recommendation blocks such as "People Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed," "Style Match" and even "Location-based Recommendations." These blocks (or widgets) can be placed anywhere you like on your website: on the landing page, category pages, product pages - even on 404 pages. In addition to recommendation blocks, Softcube's tailored search means that the first page of search results is bound to have the cuts, colors and brands your customer is after.
Softcube's personalized product recommendations can:
- showcase more than just best-sellers on your landing page;
- start showing relevant recommendations to visitors after just 2-3 clicks;
- measure revenue boost and show results in real-time;
- and increase sales by as much as 20 percent.
Price: $0-$69.99/mo. (depending on features and volume)
StoreYa gets your e-shop onto Facebook - and looking good - in a breeze. Not only can your customers access your merchandise from a second channel, but StoreYa also offers great promotional opportunities such as Refer a Friend, Coupon Pop and Exit Pop (the latter tries to convert visitors who are leaving your store).
In "3 clicks and only a few minutes," StoreYa claims that you'll be up and running on Facebook. Getting your store on Facebook creates a more social shopping experience; for example, customers can create wishlists and mark items as "Want" or "Own" and share products with their friends. E-shops can also engage their customers in a more personal, direct way through the Facebook platform.
Check out StoreYa because:
- selling on a second channel gives an e-shop and it's products more visibility;
- social media lets you connect with your customers in a unique way;
- StoreYa offers lots of great social marketing tools (see their site for more);
- it's free to set up your store on Facebook and see how it looks.
Price: $49
Instead of clicking "next," "next," "next," why not put the entire checkout process on a single page? That's exactly what Express Checkout does. Express checkout is all about keeping it simple. It doesn't require customers to create an account. It lets you disable fields like "company" or "fax" that many customers don't need. It collapses all of the checkout steps into one.
Express Checkout proves that less is more. By making the checkout process as snappy and pleasant as possible, it increases sales and saves customers from throwing their hands in the air when they forget their password or the next page fails to load at checkout time.
Express Checkout gives you:
- a streamlined purchasing process;
- ability to work with PayPal;
- simplicity- no unnecessary bells and whistles;
- and more sales and greater customer satisfaction.
Price: $119
No company or online shop is complete these days without a blog. While it may seem like overkill to some people, a well-written blog on an online shopping site can do more than just inform your customers about the latest summer trends. Blogs can also drive traffic to your website. Blog Pro helps you make this happen, as it's designed to be "SEO-friendly," meaning that search engines can easily see what you've written and possibly take it into account when they rank your position in search results.
Blog Pro is also mindful of how your content will look on social media, and makes it simple for your customers to share content to Facebook, Google+ or wherever else they might like to post.
Blogging with Blog Pro helps you to:
- create valuable content for your customers with a simple WYSIWYG editor;
- make sure your blog content is friendly to search engines (SEO-friendly);
- boost rankings in search results and increase site traffic;
- and to encourage social engagement with a sharing block on every post.
A new Magento extension can not only give your site a face-lift, but also have you selling more in no time. Try out one of the extensions we've discussed, track your results and see for yourself how Magento extensions on the Magento Connect store are a great idea for any online shop.