Top 7 OpenCart Extensions for 2018 | Must-Have E-Commerce Growth Tools
Hi and thanks for checking out our new OpenCart video.
This time we’ll be talking about the most popular extensions you MUST have in your OpenCart store.
They are designed for lowering cart abandonment rates... improving your website SEO... getting your store GDPR compliant... optimizing your site for blazing fast page speed... easier product management... selling on Facebook... and making it easy for customers to find products in your store.
So, let’s show you how to create a killer OpenCart store with the top 7 extensions on the marketplace.
First stop - Abandoned Carts. Almost 70% of shopping carts are being abandoned by online customers and this opens up a lot of opportunities for E-Commerce sites to capitalize on that.
This means a lot of potential sales and AbandonedCarts is the OpenCart extension to help you gain them.
Here’s how it works - it tracks down the shopping carts that were abandoned by customers and lets you create tons of different email templates you can send out to them.
You can schedule the perfect timing of your emails, add free shipping or discounts to hook your customers and use those emails to link back straight to their shopping carts. All the customer needs to do is confirm their order.
AbandonedCarts gathers all the customer info you need at one place. The extension lets you set automatic reminders for customers, or email them manually.
It also works well with checkouts from all kinds of OpenCart themes. The email template can be customized and you can add unique discounts codes for a fixed amount or a percentage discount.
It’s compatible with OpenCart themes and you can count on the premium iSenseLabs support for any assistance you need with AbandonedCarts.
Let’s jump to the admin panel for a brief overview. Here we can see a logged record of a shopping cart that has been abandoned. You can see the customer info, the products in the cart, and other details. We can manually send a reminder right now.
Click here and you’ll be able to configure all the details of your email. You can set the discount type and value, the discount time limit, add the powerful free shipping option, enable guest checkout and customize the email template itself.
When you’re done, simply hit the Send mail button. This moves the record into the Already notified tab here.
From here on, you can start experimenting with different email templates, call to action buttons, layout, discounts and design.
The next extension your OpenCart store needs to have is SEO Backpack. The all in one search engine optimization tool for your E-commerce site.
One of the most complex extensions we’ve ever created, and at the same time one of the easiest to work with.
SEO Backpack features a one-click button for optimizing thousands of products and pages at once.
You have an SEO score meter that displays how well your store is doing on covering the requirements of search engines for a well optimized site.
Your store will have search engine analytics that let you know the best performing pages in your store since they are the ones that will get indexed the most by Google and other search engines.
The SEO Crawler is another in-house built functionality that measures your SEO performance for individual pages. It gives you reports on important points to improve so you actually know how to use your new SEO tool.
SEO Backpack is a backend tool and it’s compatible with all major themes so you can use it without any worries.
Apart from that, the tool comes with a custom SEO URL generator, auto-generation for meta, titles, keywords and descriptions for all your products and pages, H1 and H2 tags, rich snippets and tons more features that will help you improve the ranking for your store and increase your inbound traffic.
Let’s take a peek behind the curtains. On the left you see your SEO meter and all the steps you can take to improve your score with a single click. For instance, we can now create the SEO URLs for all of our products. Done! Add meta titles for all our products? One click… and they’re all there.
Now we can test our SEO score. From 32% before taking those actions, it’s now at 41%.
Moving on, in the URLs & Linking tab you got all the settings for generating and customizing the links in your store. This is where you can add a custom URL for a specific route. This is where you setup the canonical URLs for the different types of pages, and here you have advanced settings like breadcrumbs, automatic URL generation and unification.
As you can see SEO Backpack features tons of settings for your website content, keywords, H1 & H2 tags, social media linking, rich snippets, image name optimization, and data tracking & analytics.
To wrap up, here’s a simple example of an SEO URL generated with the extension. Remember that even this can be customized and you can decide what goes into that link.
Must-have extension number 3! Since May 25th 2018, GDPR Compliance is a requirement for all websites that gather any data from citizens of the European Union. Since you’re running an online store, chances are you have users from Europe sharing some sort of personal data with you.
Doesn’t matter if it’s just an email address or their full name, address and credit card info, your website must meet the GDPR requirements for compliance.
So, if you’re running an OpenCart store in 2018, GDPR Compliance is an extension you can’t go without.
We have an entire video on how to use the extension and complete the checklist for making your store GDPR compliant.
The extension comes with the most complete set of features you can find on the market. Starting with a beautiful and easily customizable cookie consent bar, you can notify your new visitors of your privacy and cookie policy in style and give them full transparendcy and control.
You get a completely new page in your OpenCart footer where customers can use their new GDPR tools and access their personal data, change it or request its removal.
GDPR Compliance is fully compatible with Journal and Fastor themes, as well as AJAX Quick Checkout.
You will find we have prepared the translations for different languages and you can download your language here.
Heading to the admin panel, you have the complete GDPR checklist you can use to track your progress to reaching full compliance.
After enabling your module and displaying the link to the GDPR tools in the footer, you can setup the handling of your Right to be forgotten requests. This is one of the basic GDPR requirements - the requests customers can make for you to completely erase their data.
You can also control the expiration time of GDPR requests and enable privacy policy consent for your contact form and newsletter opt-ins.
This is where you customize everything about your cookie consent bar, including Privacy Policy links, tracking acceptances and the way your store will be working before and after customers accept the cookie consent.
You can decide what the cookie bar is going to say, where it’s going to be positioned, and how it’s going to match your website’s color patterns.
This is how the cookie bar looks like in our store. The preferences button give customers control over the type of cookies they accept and they can view your privacy policy, dismiss or accept your notification.
You can place this bar at the top, bottom or as a small box on the left or right of the page.
So, this is one of the most important extensions your OpenCart store must have, since the potential penalties can be fatal for many online businesses.
Next stop - NitroPack! OpenCart’s favorite speed optimization caching framework. It’s the only tool you’ll need to make your store blazing fast and give customers a swift and convenient shopping experience.
Your NitroPack dashboard is equipped with Google’s PageSpeed Score and a list of actions to take for improving that score and reaching the highest possible speeds your OpenCart store is capable of.
Featuring optimization settings for page, database, browser, and image cache, CSS and JavaScript minification as well as GZIP compression, your store’s page serve time can get up to 5000 times faster.
Your entire OpenCart site will work much better and faster with a well optimized caching system. A fast website means better search engine scores, better user experience, increased conversion rates and more overall traffic and sales.
To make things better, NitroPack is fully compatible with Journal and comes with Premium support for any kind of assistance you need.
This is how NitroPack looks like in your store.
The page score can be checked both on desktop and mobile and you can track all the rules you’ve passed and the ones that are left.
The extension will show you all the steps you need to take for optimizing your store such as enabling page caching or HTML minification.
NitroPack gives you an option to use the recommended settings to get quickly started with the optimization of your store. Or you can visit all the tabs one by one and setup the settings exactly how you want to.
The different cache systems can be used for optimizing your products, categories, SEO URLs and all the different pages in your store.
Next, the compression and minification are used for optimizing your CSS, JavaScript and HTML files, which is very important for every website.
Last, one of the most important steps to optimizing your page speed - images! They take up a lot of space and this is why NitroPack has a separate section for image optimization. You can choose the optimization method and type and keep track of the total number of optimized images and the total size you’ve saved after the process.
With this and a lot more features, NitroPack really is a complete solution for skyrocketing your website’s speed and delivering the best possible customer experience your store can.
And now, a tool designed for making the lives of OpenCart merchants easier. ProductManager!
This extension is a major upgrade to the product management section in your dashboard and lets you do quick edits to multiple products at once.
Why is it so necessary?
Because editing products one by one can take ages, while with ProductManager you can edit multiple values of multiple products with just a couple of clicks.
Edit single or multiple products without entering the product editing menu.
Upload product images with a single click.
Formula based bulk edit for price and quantity so the extension does the calculation for you.
Customize your extension and display the exact columns you are interested in editing.
Also featuring a powerful filter and sorting options that can be displayed or hidden.
Let’s take you for a quick overview.
So, this is the standard product management section.
Not much you can do except go into the settings and multiple tabs of each product individually.
And this….conveniently placed right underneath your products... Is ProductManager.
Pretty cool. So, here’s how it works. Let’s get the filter out of the way for now.
As you can see, you have these small edit icons on each product data field.
How to change your product info without entering your products? Simple. Double click.
And this goes for absolutely every field in the product list. Want to change the price? Double click, enter the new price and you’re done. Your product stock was just refilled? Edit the quantity, enter the new one and click anywhere else.
So, how to edit multiple products at once?
Just select a few of them… click the Bulk edit icon here… select the new status… click anywhere and you’ll be asked to confirm the change.
And that’s it. You just saved tons of time having to go into all of these products individually. Now imagine the same action but with hundreds or thousands of products… how much time would that save?
How about these buttons here? First one is the quick view. Click it and you will be redirected to the product in the storefront. In case you just made changes and want to see how they applied.
Next is the Quick edit button. Another great feature as it opens all the product settings and tabs in a popup without you having to leave ProductManager.
And here you have the standard edit and a shortcut to view orders.
But what’s one of the best things? Selecting the columns you want.
Want to hide certain columns? Easy as that. Want to edit the categories? Here they are. Want to add new filters? They appear right here. Want to view the product IDs? There you go.
All of this makes ProductManager an essential time saving extension for your OpenCart store.
Give it a try and you will see you can’t do without it.
Next stop - making more sales. Directly on Facebook!
FacebookStore is one of the most powerful sales channels for OpenCart stores around the world as it lets you connect your Facebook page and display a shop tab integrated with your store so you can sell your products right on the biggest social media platform in the world.
Get it integrated with your page with a single click!
FacebookStore is fully optimized to work well on all mobile devices.
It works with the OpenCart checkout so your social media followers don’t need to leave your Facebook page. They can confirm their order right then and there.
All the changes you make to your products are applied to your new Shop section in Facebook.
You don’t need any coding knowledge to setup your Facebook store.
The only requirement is that your OpenCart website has a valid and working SSL certificate. This is so Facebook knows it can serve encrypted content to your users on social media.
You can also translate your FacebookStore to any language you need!
Here is how your store will look on Facebook.
You can customize your Shop now button or choose to delete it.
You have a link that leads to your OpenCart store in case users are interested in visiting it.
And this is the store section where all your categories and products are displayed.
Let’s say we want to buy a camera. We select the category, then choose the product we want. As you can see the module works with options, so you can be sure that customers will be able to choose exactly what they want.
We add our product to the cart and this is where we begin the checkout process, just like in your OpenCart store.
Selling on social media has been a popular practice for a long time now and it’s very convenient for customers since they don’t even need to leave Facebook to make their orders.
This makes FacebookStore a must-have extension that can multiply your online sales.
And last, but not least, the best OpenCart extension to improve the product search experience for customers in your store - iSearch.
This search tool can be a miracle for your store as it delivers instant search results to customers who are looking for products on your site.
And these are customers who are important to you since they are demonstrating interest in something and taking the time to search for it on your store.
An opportunity you should not be missing. A lot of OpenCart stores are making this mistake and losing tons of customers who are trying to search for a product, but it either takes too long or the results aren’t accurate enough. Not many customers are patient enough to do a second search.
iSearch comes with a feature to display instant results as soon as a customer starts typing in the search bar.
You can exclude certain products from the results…
You can select all the different search criteria you want iSearch to use for displaying results…
You can enable singularization in case customers are search for singular or plural forms of words…
You can add possible typos customers can make when spelling out the names of your products so they still see the results they want…
You can customize iSearch any way you want and adapt it to your store the way you think it will look and work best for your customers…
And most of all - it’s fully responsive and looks great on all types of devices even on Journal and all other OpenCart themes.
Let’s show you how iSearch looks in the backend…
First, you create a new search engine.
After you enable it, you can select the multiple stores you want it to search in, if you’re running a multistore setup.
Then you can select all of the product fields you want iSearch to look into when displaying results for your customers.
In the advanced settings, you can configure your instant results, standard results, select the sorting of the results and everything else to tailor the search experience in your OpenCart store.
Next is the editing of all the texts that your customers will see in the search results.
And last, the design of iSearch.
You have tons of customization options for the size of the box, highlights for results, product suggestions, displaying images, models, prices and practically anything you need.
Here is how fast customers can find products in your store. And you can customize all of that.
Basically, iSearch is the must have extension for OpenCart stores that want to have an effective and working product search for their customers.
So, this concludes our list! We hope you understood how these tools work and why they are so important for the success of your online business.
OpenCart is a great E-Commerce system and with the right tools, you can create a winning business.
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