Magento has become the most popular open source ecommerce platform available. Developers love to use it because it is incredibly powerful but easier to use than many other platforms; it also has a thriving community of followers and authors that create high quality plugins, or extensions, that are used to further expand on the features that the platform offers. This also benefits the website owner by enhancing their experience, improving the visitor’s experience, and creating a more powerful, effective, and efficient online business.
The main Magento installation offers all of the essential and most widely used features that are required by website owners and visitors while the extensions which are often created by independent developers as well as professional software authors, offer more specific functions. However, there are some that most ecommerce websites should at least consider installing. While some of the extensions you find will be available for free, there are also commercial extensions widely found online.
Displaying or listing your products in Google Shopping can be a highly effective way of increasing sales and making greater profit. With the Google API Shopping extension, which was created by the Magento team, you can automatically push your product database into the Shopping feed. With a little promotion you could find this becomes a great earner and a superb way of enjoying a sales increase for your store.
If you are, or want to be, an Ebay seller then the M2E Pro extension is the right choice for your site. You can create and manage listings on the auction site directly through your Magento storebackend and you can automate much of the listing creation process. Not only is this more convenient and saves you time but it will open up your store to an even wide audience of potential buyers. Another great free extension, and the free version will soon include Amazon integration too.
Flexible Products
Having a customer land on a product page on your site does not guarantee that they have found exactly the product they want. By displaying a list of items according to your chosen criteria on the product page you could improve sales figures, reduce page bounce rates, and increase average sales figures. The Flexible Products extension allows you to list items according to conditions that you set. List items for men, items from a particular category, or many other options.
Going social can help ensure that your products are being seen by a market that wouldn’t otherwise have benefited from exposure to your store. The Facebook Open Graph 2.0 extension allows users to click Own and Want buttons so that your products show up on their Facebook page. This can attract even more potential customers from the contact list of your potential leads.
The more difficult the checkout process, the more likely you are to lose potential customers along the way. Therefore, reducing the number of clicks that are required in order to complete the checkout process will help you to reduce bounce rate and improve the experience that your buyers experience. One Page Checkout makes the process as simple as possible.
Most Popular Products
Some buyers are driven by what other buyers have bought in the past. You can benefit from those that follow trends by installing the Most Popular Products extension and displaying it on whichever products and pages you wish.
Improving Your Ecommerce Design
A good Magento agency will work with you to ensure that you get the most from your new ecommerce website and that you enjoy all of the potential benefits of having a website developed using one of the most popular and powerful ecommerce platforms there is.
Iv’e been looking into using magneto for a while as an open source platform for ecommerce web design, but am still undecided, however this info was very helpful and has swayed me that little bit further. Thanks a lot, matt.