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With a plethora of articles regarding Magento 2 extensions, we wanted to take a deep dive to find the most frequently recommended by industry experts in 2020. So, we polled the audience! We reached out to Magento agencies and development teams and asked them to share their most commonly recommended Magento 2 Extensions.
We only had one rule; they could not nominate any extensions that their team had written. We didn’t specify paid vs. free, integrations vs. standalone extensions, or any other parameters. As a result, the submissions turned out to be a great representation of Magento 2 Extensions.
Amasty SMTP Email Settings
As a web host, our team strongly recommends that eCommerce merchants keep their corporate e-mail accounts hosted separately from their website, whether with GSuite, Microsoft Office 365, a private mail server, or another email service. We were glad to see this submission from Tim Dolloff of Liventus. This extension helps to connect Magento stores with external mail servers so that your transactional e-mails can be sent from your external e-mail account.
Fishpig WordPress Integration
Magento 2 is a fantastic eCommerce platform, but WordPress is still the most popular Content Management System on the planet. Many Magento merchants choose to leverage some of the benefits of WordPress, such as to operate a feature-rich blog, or, to borrow a word from Shane Harper of CollinsHarper, creating “Headless” Magento sites with at least part of the frontend managed by WordPress.
Webshopapps Matrix Rate Shipping
Magento natively includes Table Rate shipping, which allows you to upload a CSV file with shipping rates. However, Table Rates can only be used for a single shipping option like “Standard Shipping.” If you want to give shoppers more options, like simultaneously offering a pre-determined rate for “Express Shipping,” this free extension from the makers of ShipperHQ will help you to offer multiple shipping rates to shoppers simultaneously based on factors like destination, weight, price or quantity in the shopping cart. Sergio Tabaran of Absolute Web recommends this extension often, and shared that even the documentation for this extension is “flawless.”
Amasty Full Page Cache Warmer
As Guillaume Le Tual of MageMontreal shared, if you do not use a cache warmer, the first person visiting each page on your website after your cache has been flushed will have the unpleasant experience of a slow website. A cache warmer pre-generates the cache to ensure everyone who visits the page for the first time after the cache was cleared will have a fast web browsing experience.
M2E Pro
According to Tarandeep Singh of RaveDigital, “For multi-channel selling M2ePro is must.”. This multichannel connection platform started in 2009 as Magento to eBay but has since expanded to include connectors for Amazon and Walmart too. It’s one of the more popular solutions on the market. Although users that are also going to connect data with other software endpoints, like an ERP or POS, will often consider other options too, like nChannel and eBridgeConnections.
Xtento Order Export
Zach Stutzman of InteractOne is a big fan of the Xtento order export extension. He found it to be “a great solution for integrating Magento orders with other platforms (CRM, OMS, ERP, etc…).” and has shared that “It’s highly flexible, scalable and very reliable.”
ShipStation
Once an order is placed, managing the shipping of that order is a multi-step process. ShipStation is one of a few well-known companies (including their sister-company, ShippingEasy) in the Magento ecosystem that helps with everything from printing shipping labels to processing returns. Alex Povolotski of CollinsHarper recommends it for “all the shipping you can think of under one umbrella.”
Amasty Invisible Recaptcha for Magento 2
While we’ve all gotten used to having to prove to a robot that we are, in fact, not robots, reCAPTCHA technology can still get in the way of shoppers and hurt various conversion rates and metrics. We enjoy that, like a good WAF, it can block some bots that would otherwise be submitting data into forms and causing you grief, but no one likes waiting in line for security. It’s a love/hate relationship at best. That’s probably why Tim Dolloff of Liventus recommends this extension. It only makes users that seem suspicious fill out a captcha form, sparing the rest of us as we “create accounts, sign up for newsletters, leave comments, and fill out contact forms.”
Unirgy URapidFlow
Zach Stutzman of InteractOne also recommends this solution for downloading and uploading data in and out of Magento. In his words, “Urapid flow is a robust product catalog import/export extension. It provides the tools and settings needed for catalog administrators to integrate the Magento catalog with other services (ie. warehouses) and data feeds.”
CyberSource Payment Gateway
Off the shelf, Magento has some payment gateways built-in. However, you may need an alternative based on your business needs. If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution to take over and optimize your checkout, you might consider a system like Bolt. However, Alex Povolotski of CollinsHarper was quick to point out this secure online payment gateway which is owned by Visa.
Fooman PDF Customiser
If you want to turn order and shipping confirmations, invoices, and credit memos, into custom great-looking PDFs, this extension is a community favorite. Brent Peterson of Wagento shared with us that his team has “depended on this extension for clients for more than 10 years now. It has always worked and help to resolve the difficulties the customers had in their invoicing and order needs. The support is above and behind awesome and Fooman has never let us down”. As an added bonus, the Fooman team is active with the Extension Developer Network (ExtDN) which we covered in our article about How to choose Magento Extensions, which is another great reason to consider their extensions.
Thank you to the Magento Experts that contributed to this article! Especially those who had to refrain from recommending their extensions, like the team at RaveDigital who operate AheadWorks, and the folks at CollinsHarper who have published many Magento Extensions as well.
Have a question about why one of these companies made a particular recommendation? We’d be happy to put you in touch with them! Just drop us a note.
This is our 3rd Community Collaboration article, where we’ve polled industry experts to bring you insights from across the eCommerce community. To read more of our Community Collaboration article series, check out the Top 18 eCommerce Shipping, Fulfillment & Returns Tips for 2020 and Up & Coming Magento 2 Integrations for 2020.
Are you a JetRails partner? Do you want to submit recommendations for community collaboration articles like these? Reach out to your JetRails partnership manager for more information!
