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There are currently more than 13,000 modules and extensions for OpenCart in the official marketplace. Logically some of them; they were found outdated and abandoned, some have been poorly tested; or there are even many cases that have been developed outside the OpenCart development directives. Therefore, make a careful selection of extensions used by your store; To save development costs is decisive.
In this article we present a careful selection of OpenCart payment extensions; and some free OpenCart extensions too, which in our experience are essential to get the most out of your store design and configuration.
The payment section of an online store; it's one of the most important areas in terms of conversion. Investigations and specialists ensure that the payment section should be short and should be completed with the least amount of steps possible. While the payment process used natively OpenCart is quite good; it is improvable; and for this purpose in the OpenCart official extensions market; there are many options to improve the payment process relatively quickly and at a low development cost.
The extension Ajax Quick Checkout is our recommendation; and is this the option used in each case that we require to improve the payment process on the web of one of our clients. This extension, developed by Dreamvention, configures each of the payment steps that OpenCart shows natively; into a single form in one page (or in several depending on the configuration that wants to be used); reducing the number of steps the user must follow; allowing to fill all the fields simultaneously; and helping to improve cart abandonment rates. The Ajax Quick Checkout module even gives you the freedom to change the order of the sections, add 1 to 3 columns and hide certain fields and options. It even responds and includes logins via social networks, making it ideal for stores with many mobile device users.
Exporting and importing data to and from an OpenCart online store is an extremely important activity. Often during the development phase of the store it is required to have data import processes and after launch for easy administration; or update prices and inventories in bulk. This type of tool is also useful when it is required to have a backup in a format different than SQL.
For these cases, ExcelPort makes it incredibly easy to export and import data from your store through a Excel file. Therefore, this extension is particularly useful if you have hundreds or thousands of products, categories and customers. With just one click, you can export or mass import products, categories, orders, customers, customer groups, options and more, which significantly reduces the amount of time you will have to spend listing and adding data to your store.
NitroPack is an extension aimed at optimizing the performance of OpenCart stores, a process often known as WPO (Web Performance Optimization); and is designed to improve the page loading speed of your entire OpenCart site. Improving the performance of a website brings significant benefits in the valuation of the website by the search engine algorithms; so that it helps to improve the positioning of the store; at once; that significantly improves the user experience; allowing quick navigation.
In any case; NitroPack is an "all-in-one" extension with multiple modules such as database cache; minified and compression of CSS and JS, image optimization; and more. It also includes an integration with the Google PageSpeed Insights API; which allows from the administration of the OpenCart store obtain an assessment of the performance of the site objectively.
Abandoned carts is what cases are usually called where a user; after entering and browsing a store; add products to the cart but the purchase does not end. In these cases; perhaps only a small incentive is necessary to ensure that the purchase process is completed and we can obtain the benefit of the sale. Therefore, for all cases where a store is generating "abandoned carts", we consider this extension as essential.
The extension AbandonedCarts is responsible for detecting carts that have been abandoned; and then send a reminder by email inviting the user to finalize the purchase. Among its features, it allows you to send discount coupons as an incentive to purchase; or schedule one or more reminders after X days have elapsed since the cart was abandoned.
OpenCart is a CMS oriented to electronic commerce; managing to cover natively, almost any need that a store may have; Unfortunately, it does not have a native way to build forms that allow it to be used to collect any type of information that is necessary in a store or website. With this extension you can build forms that could be used in things like: subscription registration, surveys, personalized contact forms, re-gather information, etc.
With OpenCart Form Builder you can create all the custom forms you want, and position them in the place where you need in OpenCart. By using the form creator, you can add in it any type of field you want, make them mandatory (by configuring the custom error message for the required fields in each of the languages configured in your store) or optional. As soon as the administrator is filled in, or any other email you want to add, you will receive a notification in the email with the data entered by the user in the form. In addition, if you wish you can configure among its options that the information is stored in the database of your store, being able to consult a detailed list of all the forms that have been processed; or even if you are a PHP programmer, you can tell the form a route in the system; so you can process the form in a personalized way.
The extension OrderReviews allows you to send an email after a certain time after a sale has been completed; to request an opinion of the product and the sales process to the buyer; and thus increase the chances of receiving product reviews. Therefore, for all cases where a store sells the same product on a recurring basis, we consider this extension as essential.
The extension has another series of functionalities that make it an essential product such as the possibility of having these emails scheduled, or it is also possible to send the customer a discount coupon as a reward and incentive to return to the store to buy new products; when you have successfully submitted an opinion.
Email marketing is one of the most efficient ways to attract customers to your e-commerce, does not entail a high cost and provides an optimal return on investment. Therefore, it has become one of the best sales channels for merchants. It is estimated that in some businesses 20% of the turnover is made through conversions using this channel.
Some hosting providers do not allow you to use the SMTP or PHP Mail function. Or even when they allow you to use them, they have important restrictions regarding the number of emails you can send per hour and per day. For these reasons it may be convenient to use Mailgun protocol for email marketing and transactional emails . With this extension you can integrate the use of your Mailgun account as an email delivery gateway; and in this way enhance the email marketing tools that OpenCart offers natively; along with the benefits of Mailgun.
Since the publication of OpenCart 2.0 make modifications through OCMOD modules; became a standard and development directive of OpenCart (later we began to have the possibility of making modifications to the core through events). The extension Modification Manager allows you to easily edit changes from the OpenCart administrator using an XML code editor. And if that was not enough; detects problems in the XML format and executes validations. It also shows a list of the files that are modified by each of the modules, and shows an error log. A tool that should not be missing in the tools arsenal of any OpenCart programmer; and it's FREE.
If your store sells physical products that require shipping, you have surely faced the need to configure shipping gateways according to the companies you work with. Within this scheme OpenCart has multiple platforms that allow you to configure shipments according to the weight of the products; or using the world's leading shipping and logistics companies. However, there may always be some casuistry that escapes from native OpenCart shipping extensions.
If the above is your case; and you need to configure new shipping methods according to elaborated and customized standards; no doubt X-Shipping Pro is a module that will allow you to configure the shipments according to your needs because it has all the thinkable options to configure the options of shipping in your store; among them, custom methods allow you to have methods with your own name, and can be based on a wide range of criteria that include shipping costs by categories, by products, based on the geo-zones configured, the price of the products; the cart total; and more (including combinations of all of the above).
If you know any extension that is not in this list; but it should be; leave us a comment on this post or contact us.
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