Lately, many e-commerce experts have been stressing on the fact that functional websites are far more profitable than websites that take their edge from cosmetic features. Sadly, it is a fact that remains to be constantly overlooked by today’s store owners. Online merchants that focus on the aesthetic appeal alone often completely miss out the vast influence good functionality has on their conversion rates. In this article, we take the opportunity of sharing 5 recommended extensions that are a must to any online store that has goals.
These 5 extensions are tested, proven and take the credit behind some of the world’s leading e-commerce stores.
1. Pre-Order Extension
Whether you are launching a new product or planning to boost sales of an existing one, Pre-order extension in among the most effective tools increase exposure towards your new products and amplify the sales of neglected ones. This extension allows you to automate your pre-order strategy, helping generate awareness and serving an impetus for early sales of your products.
When customers place an order in advance you can calculate the exact number of items pre-booked and reduce the cost of stock reordering. But most importantly, this extension significantly improves the conversion ratio of your store by minimizing cart abandonment by allowing customers to make backorders for items that are out of stock. This also reduces server load on Sale events and keeps optimizes your customer’s user experience by adding customizable “Pre Order” Button on product pages.
2. Magento 2 Gift Card Extension
Sending overly heavy gift boxes and flower bouquets to your loved ones is a thing of the past now. In today’s technologically advanced age of cyber interactions, sending gifts has become easier and more fun than ever before. Many stores now offer gift cards to help customers purchase exciting gift vouchers which they can send to their loved ones. With this functionality on your store, your customers can send gift cards via email, Print or PM, and the receiver can use it on your store to buy products.
However, creating gift card functionality on your store may require the expertise of a dedicated developer, a cost many cannot afford. To make this simple and efficient, merchants can simply download and install a gift card extension that allows store owners to create multiple types of gift cards and offer them on various occasions such as birthdays, baby showers, wedding and anniversaries, etc. Using such extensions also gives your customers the advantage of customizing their gift cards with personalized image and text. This greatly compliments your product sales and stimulates repeat business in your stores.
3. Media Gallery Extension
Adding attractive visual content to make your products compelling is imperative to the ultimate success of your online business. According to research, the human brain process images 60,000 times faster than text and retains it for a far longer period than plain textual information. Therefore, using your images and videos to your advantage is crucial for engaging and converting your customers.
However, organizing your visual content on stores is often a challenging task since many e-commerce platforms do not offer built-in features that merchants need to display images effectively alongside their products. To overcome this, you can download the Media Gallery extension that allows you to organize your media content and display them next to your products. Such extensions allow you to showcase your products with attractive images and informative videos to entice your customers. Moreover, you can also create a dedicated Media Gallery page for your media content and add filters and search box to improve navigation. You can also create multiple media albums and embed videos from popular streams such as YouTube and Vimeo on your pages. With customization features, you can further tailor these details.
4. Flash Sales Extension
Whether your objective is to build new customers, reward existing ones, or just clear your inventory, offering incentives with the purchase of your items is a proven way of getting the attention of your customer and boosting your store sales. With this strategy, you can achieve easily achieve higher revenue targets in a shorter time span. By giving special offers and promotions you give your customer the feeling of being special and induce loyalty within your prospects.
Extensions such as Flash Sales can be easily added to your store without the need for any technical knowledge. Flash Sales extension helps merchants create limited-time discount offers that you can use in your events based campaigns such as Black Friday, Back-to-School, Christmas and similar yearly festivals. These extensions come loaded with advanced features to help you personalize your promotions and manage them efficiently. For examples, you can add different count-down timers, set fixed and percentage discounts, add them to your entire catalog and show them on listings pages.
5. Layaway/Partial Payments Extension
Many merchants are prone to lose a potential sale when the customer cannot purchase their products in one sitting. This usually happens when the product has a high price and the customer comes with a predefined budget. To overcome this, developers have come up with the perfect solution that allows merchants to sell their products without facing rejection due to price.
Layaway or Partial Payments extension allows customers to purchase products directly from the store and pay the price in easy installments. This extension binds your items with an installment plan to facilitate customers in buying them and paying the rest of the amount in a fixed duration of time. By adding this to your store you not only give customers a lucrative option to acquire the product and pay later but also make more profit with each sale of the product.
Final Words
While there are a plethora of extensions that can help you enhance the functionality of your website and boost your store sales, these 5 have been shortlisted on the basis of availability, compatibility, features, and affordability. They cost very minimum, come with lots of customization options and give a sound proposition to new online startups that need to get in the game fast and start generating revenues.
