Wednesday 27 August 2014

Top 5 Magento Extensions To Bolster Your Site's Performance


Most (though not all) of the e-commerce marketers bank upon Magento to build their e-store. The popularity of this platform can be attributed to the ease it provides in setting up an online store. However, the e-commerce industry keeps on evolving, and hence, it becomes imperative to provide the best online shopping experience. Doing so requires putting in a lot of efforts in terms of providing great content, meaningful search results and so on. Below is a list of 5 very best Magento extensions that can help embed all such functionalities in your Magento website and ameliorate its performance: 

 

1. Magento WordPress Integration

No doubt, Magento is a great e-commerce platform but it lacks the blogging capability. There's nothing to worry, as you can easily integrate a WordPress blog to your Magento site using the Magento WordPress Integration extension. WordPress is touted as the most sought-after blogging platform, and thus, adding a WP blog to your Magento site using the Magento WordPress Integration plugin can help boost your SEO and lets you publish good content. If you are finding difficulty in integrating the extension or in case it doesn't fit your Magento theme, you can choose to hire the services of custom magento development company to fulfill your needs.

2. Catalog Search Refinement

If customers know exactly what they want, they would head directly to search the product. And having a dysfunctional search functionality can ruin your business image. Unfortunately, the Magento default search functionality doesn't produce great search results. But you can make your Magento site's search results more relevant for the users using the Catalog Search Refinement extension. This is a free extension provided by Activo extensions. It modifies the standard Magento search functionality and show products containing ALL the search keywords.

3. One Step Check extension for Magento

One of the biggest problem that most of the website owners are experiencing is increasing shopping cart abandonment rate. In order to tackle such problem, it becomes necessary for you to provide a simplified checkout process to your customers. The One Step Checkout extension helps in making the checkout process of a Magento e-shop simple and faster for the customers. This extension cuts down the checkout steps and enable your customers in completing the checkout process in a single transaction.

4. Multiple Select In Layered Navigation

When filtering a product in a Magento site, by default users can choose only one option from each product group. But using the Multiple Select in Layered Navigation extension customers can choose multiple options of the same filter criteria at one time.

5. Gift Cards

Rewarding your customers can boost your sales and even helps in drawing new customers to your site. The Magento Gift Cards extension is a viable option to add gift cards functionality to your site. Using this extension you can help your customers choose to receive gift cards in the form of print-out gift cards, e-mail gift cards and classic ones. Gift Cards comes with several configuration options and can be adjusted to meet your specific needs. This extension now contains “pre-generated codes” option, allowing you to sell pre-generated gift card codes on your Magento site.

Conclusion

Want to push your Magento website sales? Well, then it is essential to augment the performance of your site. Luckily, there are tons of Magento extensions available online that can be used to enhance your site's functionality such as the ones discussed above.

Tuesday 5 August 2014

Top 3 Easy to Use and Cost-Effective SaaS Shopping Carts



The e-commerce market is rising as more and more online surfers prefer to make purchases via an e-store. Observing this scenario, it's certain that online businesses whether small or large will be interested in setting up their online store. Besides, there are several e-commerce software available online that can be used to build an e-store quickly, and thus, make it possible for the businesses reach to a wider audience and make more money.

When developing an online site, most of the small business owners (if not all) usually choose a self-hosted solution. However, self hosting can create a lot of headaches – that may include installing servers, fixing patches and so on. So, if you're a small business owners and looking for a cost-effective e-commerce solution, then you can opt for a hosted solution such as SaaS (Software as a Service). SaaS let online retailers open up their e-commerce store at minimum expenses. 
 

If you want to look for some of the most cost-effective shopping carts, then below is a list of top 5 SaaS shopping carts that are worth considering:

Shopify

Shopify is well-known for providing highly reliable services and comes loaded with exemplary features. In addition, it is customizable and easy to use. Some of the top-notch e-commerce websites count on Shopify for e-commerce solutions. The best part is that Shopify is available for trial for a period of 30 days. The basic version of this shopping cart costs $29.0 per month. It is the best choice for emerging small business owners who covet to develop an e-store that can help them flourish into successful companies.

Volusion

Volusion offers some fascinating ready-made templates and a plenty of features, which helps make shopping become a breeze for your customers. Especially its features such as vZoom, comparison shopping, one page checkout etc., will definitely help you build a store that will deliver a satisfying user experience. Volusion is available for 14 day free trial, and after the completion of trial period you can pick any scheme that starts at $19 per month to install the Volusion version.

Big Cartel

This is a great web-based e-commerce solution that is dedicated for artists (be it crafters or musicians) that allows them to sell their products online in a hassle-free manner. It comes with basic yet essential e-commerce features that can help build a small e-shop with generic designs, ability to add new products, track inventory and other features. Although, Big Cartel doesn't boasts tons of features may make it a unenviable option for some of the people yearning for a more advanced e-store, but for start-ups and small artists it seems a viable choice that makes the initial setup of the online website pretty simple and smooth.

Conclusion

If you are a small online retailer and are looking for SaaS shopping carts (or e-commerce platforms) that are technically easy to operate, then you can refer to the above discussed top 3 shopping carts that will return a true value of your money. Magento Go is also a great SaaS e-commerce solution for e-store owners. However, this shopping cart is going to shut down on February 2015. So, in case you have been using this cart you will have to migrate this SaaS e-commerce solution. In order to carry out the migration effectively within your budget limit, you can choose to outsource Magento migration services.