Top Useful Tips On How To Choose Best Magento Extensions

Magento market currently offers abundance of extensions; every week, when you log in on Magento Connect, you see many newly released extensions. Approximately, there are more than 6,000 free and paid extensions available for you to choose from. That is such a huge range of selections.

Let’s take an example of Free Gift extension: there are more 50 Free Gift extensions available on Magento Connect. So if you are in need of free gift extension, how can you make the right decision? The following useful tips will resolve this difficult question for you in order to have the best extension suitable with your demand.

1. Define your purpose clearly

The default Magento already offers full features for an ecommerce website. Magento extensions provide supporting features to make it better and meet the business demand of store owner. Hence, it is not necessary to install many extensions on your site, which are costly as well as ineffective. Firstly, defining your purpose clearly is so important, and no one understands your business demand more than you. There are some extensions, which are crucial for any store such as: One Page Checkout, Reward Points, Free Gift, Ajax Cart, etc. However, if your products are virtual ones, a delivery extension makes no sense.

2. Get to know the idea of copy provider

As the demand and supply law, the lower the price is, the more people tend to buy. Price always plays important decision factor when choosing any product. However, don’t let this factor ruins your business. Firstly, the lower price will attract you, but don’t forget to check other important factors such as: the quantity and quality of features, refund period, support services, upgrade policy, etc.

There are many extensions, which look alike in feature, however, the prices are far different. How comes their ideas are the same? The first reason is that they may have the same ideas and release at the same time. The second one is that there is a copy provider because no one depreciates great efforts that they have made on developing extensions.

The next part will give you detail tips on how to choose best magento extensions wisely after you have ideas of purpose and low quality provider.

3.  Detail tips on how to choose best magento extensions

When you are overwhelmed with too many extensions to choose from, take a look at these useful tips:

- Self experience the extension: Providers may state many features of extensions, and they seem all the same. However, the user experience is the different point. Take your time to experience them both frontend and backend demo. The things you should consider at this step are the smooth running, easy configuration, frontend design, etc. Sometimes, that too many features is not a really good point. Remember the best one is the one suits your need most.

- Check product “ChangeLog”: By checking this section, you get to know the product‘s life-cycle to see how the provider focuses on improving products with the number of improvements, bug fixes, newly added features, etc. The extension could be excellent in the past but ecommerce develop instantly, it should be updated usually to meet current customer demand. The provider, who pays attention to upgrade extensions frequently, should be highly appreciated.

-  Read customers’ reviews: It is necessary to look through customer reviews of your interested provider. You can find critical reviews on Magento Connect, social networks (facebook, twitter, linkdin, youtube), website, etc. However, remember that one provider can be good at certain extensions but not at others. Hence, pay attention on general aspect of provider such as quality of code, support, customer policy, etc. Then if you have interest on specific extension, take a closer look at reviews of that extension.

- Check provider’s history: The history of provider can let you know the experience of provider. Is it a newly established provider or a long established one with thousands of customers? As you know Magento extension market is fiercely competitive so an experienced provider partly proves their capacity compared with rivals.

- Try communicating provider: Submit a ticket to support team to see how provider response. Are they just eager to make a sale or they just reply honestly what they can and can’t do? Moreover, make sure the included services if you purchase with them. An early conversation before purchasing is extremely important especially when you use custom template or have particular requirements.

I hope with above tips, you will have smart choice of Magento extension!