Do You Know the Best Plugins for Your Magento Site?
Magento is one of the best ecommerce platforms available today, partly because it is very flexible and highly expandable. There is an endless array of themes and plugins that you can use to create the perfect online store for your products and services.
Even better, you can add new functionalities and expand the site even further with the best plugins. The customer management facilities are also second to none!
WordPress & Magento
In today’s era of content marketing, not having a proper Blog section is an opportunity missed. You can add a blog to your Magento site by installing another CMS platform or by using the built-in features that Magento offers. You can even develop your own add-on to enable blogging on Magento.
The best way to start a blog on your Magento site, however, is by using the Magento WordPress Integration plugin. It is simply the best way to integrate WordPress to Magento, especially if you don’t want to worry too much about switching between WordPress and Magento every time you want to manage different parts of your site.
The Magento WordPress Integration extension combines WordPress seamlessly with your Magento site. You can access the blog portion of your site directly from the admin panel. The extension will even take care of integrating the front-end interface with your existing Magento theme.
Yes, you still get all of WordPress’s powerful blogging features. You can add WordPress plugins, customize the layout of your blog further and do virtually anything you can do on a standalone WordPress installation.
Delete Orders
I’m sure all online store owners prefer to process orders instead of deleting them, but there are instances where having the ability to delete Magento orders is a huge help. When you are testing a new payment gateway or new features on your online store, for instance, you may create some dummy orders to see how everything functions; deleting these dummy orders isn’t always easy to do.
A handy Magento extension, aptly named Delete Orders, from MGT-Commerce is the perfect plugin to use in this case. It adds a new option to the standard Order Status drop down on your Magento admin panel. Now you can do more than just cancel orders or change their statuses. You can choose to delete an order entirely.
This plugin also helps you avoid making mistakes when editing your Magento database directly. If you are an experienced administrator or developer, deleting orders using MySQL commands or PHPMyAdmin may not be such a big deal. If you’re not, however, this extension is definitely for you.
Product Reviews!
Recent studies show that positive product reviews can drive sales up by as much as 80%. Customers tend to have more confidence in making purchase decisions when they see good reviews on the products they are considering. The way reviews and ratings are displayed “for example, by showing star ratings on the Products page” also matter.
In this case, you should consider integrating Yotpo reviews to your Magento site. Yotpo is a service that collects product reviews from customers and users. It brands itself as a user-generated marketing tool and gathers reviews in unconventional, “but highly effective” ways. Integrating Yotpo to your Magento site means instantly gaining access to a wealth of content already collected by the service.
The Yotpo extension for Magento is available for free; the service itself is also free, but there are a number of premium plans to choose from if you want to enjoy more features. Once installed, you can configure the extension to automatically ask for customers’ reviews. It can even be configured to send customers request-a-review email after a certain period of time.
Live Customer Support
I’m sure a lot of you think that offering live support is difficult to do. You need to allocate time and prepare a lot of things to have live support available on your Magento site. You still need to allocate time to offer live support, but the preparation is actually easier than you think.
Zopim Live Chat for Magento is the extension you want to use in this case. Zopim is a well-known live chat service for site owners. The service is available for free with several premium plans available. It basically allows you to chat with your customers directly and offer good customer support.
That said, Zopim is a lot more than just a live chat platform. With the extension installed, you can offer customers help when they are stuck on a page for too long. You can also have multiple customer support officers, set office hours (during which live support is available) and let customers leave messages for you to reply later.
You also get a dashboard for tracking and maintaining everything. Good customer support always leads to more sales, so the Zopim Live Chat extension for Magento is definitely a plugin you want to consider adding to your site.
Best Plugins for Your Magento Site
That’s it. We have shared a list of must have plugins for a successful Magento site.
What plugins do you find the most useful or necessary for your Magento site? Let us know in the comments below.
