September 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

September 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

SEPTEMBER 2017 ORANGE REPORT

For this month’s Orange Report, we’re resolving your speed, accessibility and customer care concerns. Like always, we encourage everyone using Magento to make the most of it’s functionalities by incorporating the very best Magento extensions and news. So we have created the monthly Orange Report to keep ourselves up to date and to recognize some of our favorite Magento news and extensions.

FMEextensions - Photo Gallery & Product Gallery

Displays photo galleries or lightboxes on category, product and CMS pages. Loads images via AJAX, which does not require page reload. Includes controls for image size and aspect ratio within the extension admin panel.

Boostmyshop - Embedded ERP

Integrating an ERP with Magento can entail a lot of work. Some merchants just live with them being separated, using export and import tools to relay information. This extension keeps the ERP functionality in Magento – easing management of inventory, order, pick and pack and more (definitely more – the user guide is 200 pages long!) Note, the extension does modify Magento core files; Boostmyshop says they offer support to resolve extension conflicts that may occur as a result.

Fooman - Connect Xero

Using the Xero accounting package? Here’s a way to integrate Xero to your Magento admin, avoiding time-consuming and error-prone exports and imports. Available as a monthly service, the connector is multi-store capable and allows control of order status triggers and manual exclusion of orders.

Litmus7 Labs - MERC

Everyone wants a performance edge. Caching technologies are hot, as developers, merchants and hosting companies alike scramble for ways to accelerate page delivery. MERC provides a means to integrate Redis cache with Magento. The tool manages and monitors cache key hit rates, allows for bulk delete, and displays an array of performance and base activity metrics.

August 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

August 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

AUGUST 2017 ORANGE REPORT

For this month’s Orange Report, we’re resolving your speed, accessibility and customer care concerns. Like always, we encourage everyone using Magento to make the most of it’s functionalities by incorporating the very best Magento extensions and news. So we have created the monthly Orange Report to keep ourselves up to date and to recognize some of our favorite Magento news and extensions.

Dotmailer - eMail for Magento

dotmailer is a leading email automation platform with a mission to empower marketers with the tools that make it easy to get dramatic results. dotmailer provides the most feature rich Magento integration for Magento 1 & 2, and is a global company with offices in New York, London, Europe and APAC with in-house Magento development, services and support teams.

Unirgy – uRapidFlow Sales

For years, uRapidFlow has been the go-to solution for import and export of Magento catalog and customer data; we have installed it for many of our clients. Now, Unirgy applies the same approach to sales and financial data import and export. The new extension, just released in July, promises expanded control versus Magento’s default export and reporting capabilities, as well as potential streamlining of migrations from other platforms to Magento.

iDevDirect – iDevAffiliate

Affiliate relationships can be difficult to manage, so a tool that tracks, reports, and automates incentives could help boost the profitability of this business approach. iDev includes per-product and coupon code commissioning as well as monitoring of traffic and SEO gains from the affiliate promotions. Can be deployed as installed software or a cloud service.

Amasty - Multi Warehouse Inventory

“Multi-Warehouse” might, in your case, mean multiple stores. No matter how humble your situation, multi-location inventory management presents challenges for efficient and accurate POS, eCommerce, shipping and redistribution, since Magento doesn’t provide multi-warehouse functionality. Amasty’s extension fills the gap with the ability to assign custom shipping rates by location and other advanced stock management options.

WebShopApps - MatrixRate

Speaking of shipping … to get the best rates, a merchant might need to consider size thresholds for one carrier, weight limitations for another and pricing implications for all of them. MatrixRate provides an interface to set up your negotiated and standard rates and can filter prices by destination, weight, price or quantity.

July 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

July 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

JULY 2017 ORANGE REPORT

For this month’s Orange Report, we’re resolving your speed, accessibility and customer care concerns. Like always, we encourage everyone using Magento to make the most of it’s functionalities by incorporating the very best Magento extensions and news. So we have created the monthly Orange Report to keep ourselves up to date and to recognize some of our favorite Magento news and extensions.

Zerolag - Magento Hosting

ZeroLag’s eCommerce hosting services for Magento Enterprise Edition and Magento Community Edition provide the highest levels of performance, reliability, and security. They are best in class Magento hosting and support. As far as we know, no one does it better!

MageBees – Lazy Load Images

Page load speed is a primary target for developers and merchants alike, since search engines penalize slow-loading pages. Lazy Load allows the images to load on scroll, calling up the image only when the visitor scrolls to within a selected threshold (in pixels) of the image container. The tool lets you upload any “loading” icon you choose, which may be a bit ironic, since you really don’t want your shoppers to have to look at a loading icon.

Olark – Live Chat

Olark installs via a snippet you paste into your footer code. Trial and premium versions are available. Premium service allows for more flexibility and rule-building around when the chat box shows up and how it interacts with the site visitor. Like anything driven by javascript, this live chat service can add to the weight of your pages, so keep an eye on that.

Amasty – Extended Product Grid with Editor

Both M1 and M2 merchants often come to us looking for more flexibility and efficiency with editing products. This extension permits bulk editing of products directly in the product grid – including name, sku, category, visibility, quantity and status. For merchants whose catalogs never sit still, this tool can save weeks of data entry time. The M2 version includes grid customization and the ability to save and quickly access grid layouts.

Magmodules – Rich Snippets suite

Even if you’d have to look up what “rich JSON markup” means, that doesn’t mean you don’t need it. As SEO grows in complexity, subtle changes to how your website presents information within browsers can make a big difference in how shoppers find and interact with your offerings. Merchants use this to quickly and easily control their structured data markup.

June 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

June 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

JUNE 2017 ORANGE REPORT

For this month’s Orange Report, we’re resolving your speed, accessibility and customer care concerns. Like always, we encourage everyone using Magento to make the most of it’s functionalities by incorporating the very best Magento extensions and news. So we have created the monthly Orange Report to keep ourselves up to date and to recognize some of our favorite Magento news and extensions.

Sales and Use Tax Compliance for Dummies

Avalara is the leader in sales tax automation and can help alleviate the challenges associated with sales tax compliance. Download the special edition of “Sales and Use Tax Compliance for Dummies” E-Book and learn the difference between sales and use tax and how to comply with complex regulations, how to determine Nexus and what it means and how to manage exempt sales to avoid an audit.

Adaptive Subscriptions for Magento 2

Magento 2 does not include recurring profiles (unlike Magento 1). That’s ok though, because the M1 capability was a little limiting and quirky. This extension lets you set up rules for payment intervals with initial order adjustments, grouped subscription billing, cart price rules, full admin and display control. Customers can choose to purchase products as a subscription or singly, if selected by the merchant.

Ask for Special Price

Enables customers and shop owners to create a Request for Quote. Includes configurable tax settings, shipping methods, custom emails and sales rep assignment. The quote form builder permits detailed setup of required and optional fields, registration mode and quantity tiers.

Search Spell Correct

As your catalog grows, search becomes a critical way your customers will quickly find what they want. Spelling errors can be an unseen blocker to increased conversion – this tool analyzes your catalog and suggests alternatives when it encounters a blooper. While Spell Correct can be used alone, the developer promotes it along with their own upgraded search (Sphinx) and auto-complete.

Autoresponder Max

Monthly subscription service permits access to a library of email, surveys and other engagement tools. Email sends are triggered by a range of pre-and post-purchase events (e.g. abandoned cart, cross-sell, first purchase, review teasers) at a more granular level than the transactional-centered Magento templates provide.

May 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

May 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

MAY 2017 ORANGE REPORT

For this month’s Orange Report, we’re resolving your speed, accessibility and customer care concerns. Like always, we encourage everyone using Magento to make the most of it’s functionalities by incorporating the very best Magento extensions and news. So we have created the monthly Orange Report to keep ourselves up to date and to recognize some of our favorite Magento news and extensions.

Extension Hut - Customer Approval

Expands customer grouping capabilities – enabling the merchant to automatically or manually approve new accounts. Does not interfere with the default registration process. Provides email notification to the admin and the new account, and can redirect the visitor to custom CMS pages or error messages if disqualified.

Amasty - Pre-Order

Dynamically changes the Add to Cart button to “Pre-Order” when the admin-selectable stock status for a given sku is encountered (zero, or 1 and greater). Displays custom pre-order messages at category and product level. We especially like that Amasty warns merchants about performance issues that could crop up if used with non-simple products.

Magebuzz - Social Share

There are numerous ways to get social buttons on your site – some involving a developer. Using a purpose-built extension (like this one for Magento 2) gives you a simple user panel to select pages and positions to display the buttons.

M2E - M2E Pro

The “E” in M2E used to refer to eBay only, but the solution has grown and now offers integration of Magento to Amazon and Rakuten, as well as eBay. With a client-server architecture, processing happens outside of Magento – avoiding potential scalability issues present in on-board solutions.

UptimeRobot

Downtime is bad; you know that already. This free tool (not a Magento extension) provides nifty notification and several different monitoring types: “http(s)” for your domain; “ping” for your server; “keyword” for … keywords; and “port” for monitoring smtp, dns and pop services.

April 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

April 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

APRIL 2017 ORANGE REPORT

For this month’s Orange Report, we’re resolving your speed, accessibility and customer care concerns. Like always, we encourage everyone using Magento to make the most of it’s functionalities by incorporating the very best Magento extensions and news. So we have created the monthly Orange Report to keep ourselves up to date and to recognize some of our favorite Magento news and extensions.

Aitoc – Review Booster

Magento’s default reviews works well,  but is pretty basic: no “verified purchaser” or ability for customers to rate the usefulness of comments.  A strong stream of credible reviews is a proven conversion asset. Review Booster from Aitoc gives broad flexibility to merchants who want to allow their customers to help sell their products.

Amasty – Special Promotions Pro

Need more pricing and discount flexibility? This extension from Amasty expands Magento’s cart pricing with an array of tools, including the ability to build promotional pricing based on a customer’s number of completed orders and total sales amount.

Ordoro

Among its other capabilities, Ordoro makes dropshipping and multi-channel fulfillment more efficient and accountable.  We also like the “kitting” feature, which puts a different twist on Magento’s bundled product type.

Xtento – Stock Import

This extension eases the import of all fields related to the stock entity – including Quantity in stock, Is in stock, and Manage stock. Handy test and debug mode sounds like extra work but is a recommended step..

Wyomind – Simple Google Shopping for Magento 2

If you’re going to join the fray and sell via a Google Merchant account, you need to control your costs by tacking on some efficiency. Simple Google Shopping from Wyomind promises just that.

March 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

March 2017 Orange Report: Magento Extensions and Tools

MARCH 2017 ORANGE REPORT

For this month’s Orange Report, we’re resolving your speed, accessibility and customer care concerns. Like always, we encourage everyone using Magento to make the most of it’s functionalities by incorporating the very best Magento extensions and news. So we have created the monthly Orange Report to keep ourselves up to date and to recognize some of our favorite Magento news and extensions.

Image Optimizer for Magento 2

In a great example of “truth in advertising,” Apptrian points out that although their image optimization extension makes the task easier, nobody claimed it would be effortless or foolproof! Image Optimizer harnesses well-known command line tools and packages them in a free extension that can handle the jpeg, png and gif formats together in batch files. Read the documentation, make sure your server is configured correctly, use in good health.

Google Tag Manager Enhanced Ecommerce

If you’ve fiddled around with your Magento theme at all (or heaven forbid, core), you may have noticed that some of your analytics might not be tracking everything the way you assumed or wished it would. Anowave built their Magento Google Tag Manager Enhanced Ecommerce (UA) Tracking extension to bypass many of those obstacles and to help merchants utilize and consolidate a broader range of tag capabilities while using a single dashboard interface.

Performance Issues Tool for Magento 2

Zeroing in on Magento page-load problems usually requires more than a glance at file sizes or a call to your hosting provider. Aoe Profiler is available on Github and is a more comprehensive alternative to the native profiler capability in Magento. The extension is used to diagnose, debug and troubleshoot Magento performance issues.

Customer Purchases Extension for Magento 2

Aheadworks wrote its Customer Purchases extension to allow customer service teams one-click access to a customer’s Magento purchase history. Quickly view item price paid, dates and other associated data without running reports or waiting for filtering.

Import and Export Tool for Magento 2

Unless your SKU count can be tracked on the fingers and toes of your immediate family, you might be in need of an import/export tool for Magento. uRapidFlo from Unirgy has been a go-to for InteractOne for years because of its flexible capabilities, solid API integration, ability to handle large and complex catalogs.

February 2017 Orange Report: Magento News

February 2017 Orange Report: Magento News

FEBRUARY 2017 ORANGE REPORT

For this month’s Orange Report, we’re resolving your performance, accessibility and customer care concerns. Like always, we encourage everyone using Magento to make the most of it’s functionalities by incorporating the very best Magento extensions and news. So we have created the monthly Orange Report to keep ourselves up to date and to recognize some of our favorite Magento news and extensions.

ShipStation for Magento 2

ShipStation is a web-based shipping solution that allows you to create shipping labels for all major carriers.

ElasticSearch: Not just for the Enterprise crowd

Boost your on-site search results with Elasticsearch, the distributed real-time search engine for the cloud.

“Who Bought This Also Bought” for Magento 2

Uses order history to list suggested purchases and is based on real buyer behavior in real time.

Blog Extension for Magento 2

Brings much-needed CMS flexibility to Magento, along with social tie-ins and product relatability.

Store Locator for Magento 2

A store locator for some, but B2B shops can use this to show dealer locations, warehouses or any other location-based data.

January 2017 Orange Report: Magento News

January 2017 Orange Report: Magento News

JANUARY 2017 ORANGE REPORT

For this month’s Orange Report, we’re resolving your performance, accessibility and customer care concerns. Like always, we encourage everyone using Magento to make the most of it’s functionalities by incorporating the very best Magento extensions and news. So we have created the monthly Orange Report to keep ourselves up to date and to recognize some of our favorite Magento news and extensions.

SUPEE PATCH 8788

The new security patch addresses Zend framework and payment vulnerabilities, ensures sessions are invalidated after a user logs out, and more.

3rd Party Marketplaces

Want to increase your selling power with the major online players such as Amazon, eBay, and Walmart? With our Magento background and eCommerce marketing expertise, we will guide you through the process to get you set up and selling more.ss.

Product Preview Pro

This extension will enhance your site’s user experience by allowing a customer to preview scaled-up product images from category pages.

BluePay for Magento

Attention Magento Merchants: BluePay will beat your current credit card processing fees! You will gain the highest level of credit card protection from using the BluePay iframe while saving money on every swipe.

Developing with Large Databases

The Subscribe Pro platform is the most feature rich stable subscription (autoship) profile management tool we’ve ever used and now it’s available for Magento 2.

Have Customers Call You

Do you have products that you need customers to call you for pricing on? This extension lets you hide product price and the “Add to Cart” button and shows info to encourage them to contact you.

Sell More in Less Time

Add a unique selling tool to your shop with this extension that shows an attractive promotional block to your customers.

November 2016 Orange Report: Magento News

November 2016 Orange Report: Magento News

NOVEMBER 2016 ORANGE REPORT

For this month’s Orange Report, we’re resolving your speed, accessibility and customer care concerns. Like always, we encourage everyone using Magento to make the most of it’s functionalities by incorporating the very best Magento extensions and news. So we have created the monthly Orange Report to keep ourselves up to date and to recognize some of our favorite Magento news and extensions.

Is it Time to Stick a Fork in Your Magento 1.x Site?

Magento 2 comes with all the fixins’! It’s faster, more secure and has improved customization. Start planning your upgrade today… the rest is gravy!

Facebook Pixel for Magento 2

Need to track sales conversions from Facebook traffic? This extension places the Facebook Tracking Pixel on your site and adds Event Trackers for better ROI and statistics.

Sweet Loyalty Programs

Sweet Tooth allows merchants to build customized loyalty programs that delivers results.

Remediating Your Site After a Malware Attack

Has your site been hacked? If so, follow this guide to re-secure your site.

Google Tag Manager for Magento 2

Instead of managing Google Adwords and Google Analytics separately, you can control both of them through the Google Tag Manager site with this Magento 2 extension.

Elasticsearch for Magento 2.1

Magento 2 comes with a built-in Elasticsearch integration. Elasticsearch  enables you to take data from any source, any format, and search, and visualize it in real time.

Common Magento Coding Standards

Magento’s coding standards may seem overbearing, but they are a reflection of the sensitivity and scope of the websites we work on.

Salesforce Integrations for Magento 2

Automatically synchronize data to Salesforce CRM system as soon as the data is updated on Magento 2.