Nine top plug-ins to make your Magento site boom

One of the Magento platform and ecosystem’s key attributes is that it is open sourced, so that trusted partners and developers can create plug-ins for the service that will add all manner of cool extra functionality to your site – while also helping keep your site different to everyone else’s.

But with more than 500 to chose from what do you do? Well, naturally it all depends what you are looking to achieve and what your site does, but here are nine of the key plug-ins we think are essential or just downright cool.

E2M –eBay to Magento extension
Price: $99
Compatibility: 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.6.1, 1.6.2.0, 1.7, 1.8 of Community
The Ebay2Magento Extension allows you to import products, pricing and description from eBay to your Magento Store, turning them into Magento content. The software plug-in allows you to also update pricing, stock quantity, images and more.

Try a live demo
Front-end
Back-end

MegaMe
Price: €59.90
Compatibility: 1.6, 1.6.1, 1.6.2.0, 1.7, 1.8 of Community
The e-commerce world is a multi-device world and you need to keep pace with that. MegaMe Menu is an advanced Magento menu tool that allows for the creation of out-of-the-box responsive and mobile layout for your site. It features custom static blocks positions inside of the menu itself, which can be used to display different content depending on the shown category. MegaMe Menu is specifically designed for web designers who want to provide their clients with an extremely customized and adaptive Mega Menu system on their Magento e-commerce site.

MegaMe Menu supports different view modes:
• Full-width menu display – Content-adaptive width with customizable alignment; Classic tree-layout with customizable static blocks positions. You can add static content menu items, linked menu items and automatically generated category menus.
• Mobile-enhanced layout – MegaMe Menu features a mobile-enhanced layout which is designed especially for smartphones. Custom static blocks can be provided for the mobile layout of MegaMe Menu, allowing the designer to enhance the communicative efforts even on mobile devices.

Login Reward Points
Price: $49.00
Compatibility: 1.10, 1.11, 1.11.1, 1.12, 1.13 of Enterprise
Everyone likes getting rewards, and now you can reward customers for logging into your site and hopefully drive repeat business. This tool allows you to You can select the time frame for running rewards, let’s you also set a number of times for which these points will be awarded (so you can be sure that one of your users isn’t awarded 100 times) and your admins can type in a congratulation message (“Welcome back, we’ve missed you! Here are 20 loyalty points that you can use to buy shoes on our website”).

Bronto
Price: Free
Compatibility: 1.6, 1.6.1, 1.6.2.0, 1.7, 1.8 of Community
Bronto is a Gold Magento Industry Partner and the Bronto extension helps Magento customers to drive more sales faster by creating highly targeted lifecycle marketing campaigns that convert one-time buyers into repeat customers and motivate them to buy more. Key things offered by Bronto are the ability to import purchase info to aid targeted email marketing, map customer information and import it into Bronto’s contact field, calculate RFM values and send out abandoned cart reminders. It also helps you send out newsletters.

Watch this to learn how the Bronto Extension for Magento works

Springbot
Price: Free
Compatibility: 1.3, 1.4, 1.4.1.1, 1.4.2, 1.5, 1.6, 1.6.1, 1.6.2.0, 1.7, 1.8 of Community
Springbot is a Magento Gold Industry Partner and offers what it calls ‘marketing robotics” – which in reality means helping deliver data driven marketing for your business. Springbot claims to help you level the playing field and compete with the way Amazon uses demographic data to drive traffic and sales. In a nutshell, Springbot automatically tracks your data and turns it into actionable marketing, the results of which it then tracks to refine and refine what you do.

See it in action here

AvaTax Calc Connector
Price: Free
Compatibility: 1.3, 1.4, 1.4.1.1, 1.4.2, 1.5, 1.6, 1.6.1, 1.6.2.0, 1.7, 1.8 of Community
Boring but important – and if Benjamin Franklin is right, inevitable – tax is something that you have to be on top of and Avalara can address your sales tax challenges with AvaTax. A fast, easy, accurate and affordable way to calculate sales tax, it also lets you manage exemption certificates, file returns and remit payments across multiple tax regions. And it is all thanks to the Orwellian- sounding ‘tax decision engine’, which determines rates based on 100,000+ taxability rules in 11,000+ taxing jurisdictions and instantly applies them to each transaction within your Magento shopping cart.

Advanced Reports by aheadWorks
Price: $129.00 (Enterprise merchants can request a FREE trial)
Compatibility: Magento Go
Let’s face it – if you can’t analyse your activities using up-to-date, comprehensive reports, you cannot effectively and efficiently conduct business. So of course there are many tools out there to help you. One of the most comprehensive for MagentoGo users is Advanced Reports, which allows you to, among many other things, assess best sellers, sales by hour/day-of-the-week/product/country, along with customer reports and pretty much any combination thereof.

See a live demo here

Facebook store application
Price: Free
Compatibility: 1.4, 1.4.1.1, 1.4.2, 1.5, 1.6, 1.6.1, 1.6.2.0, 1.7 on Community
The future could well be social commerce based, certainly if what’s happening in Japan and Korea is to be believed. So you may has well make a start and get your store on Facebook. This app lets you import your store onto the social networking site with pretty much one click and gives you access to a stats dashboard, all currencies, Want and Own buttons and cross-sharing with Twitter and G+.

Simple Google Shopping
Price: €30.00
Compatibility: 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.4.1.1, 1.4.2, 1.5, 1.6, 1.6.1, 1.6.2.0, 1.7, 1.8 of Community
Google Shopping is a free Google service that allows users to find and compare products they want to buy online. If your are online merchant, you can submit your products to Google Shopping to help your final customers to find your website more quickly and more easily. Google Merchant Center is an interface designed for store owners and sellers to help them to submit their items to Google Shopping.