Top 5 Magento Extensions for Adding Shopping Cart

 Magento is an open source web application for ecommerce, shopping cart sites. It is a feature–rich, ecommerce platform that can be highly customized to suit the needs of any kind and size of business and can be managed easily. With over 150,000 online retailers, it is the most favored platform for small and large business alike and even corporations such as Samsung and Harvey Nichols.

Extensions are great tools in enhancing the functionality of Magento. They also help in facilitating the web interface with other 3rd party applications. They help your ecommerce business to prosper, resulting in higher profits. Magento development teams are well versed and proficient in developing relevant extensions tailor made for your specific business needs. Extensions add a great degree of functionality and make the business more systematic and organized.

Extensions play a vital role in building a successful Magento based shopping cart applications with rich features. Some of the top shopping cart applications are:

• Magento Quick View: Helps you to quickly view and learn about the product in detail without actually visiting the actual product page. All the information about the product pops up in a fancy box. Using AJAX, it lets you add the required quantity of the product to the cart, eliminating the need for the customers to navigate back and forth during shopping. It displays the updated information of the cart status like the number of items added, and the value of the items etc. It also lets you share the product information on social media sites like face book, twitter etc.
• Magento Gift Wrap: Helps your customers get their gift purchases an impressive and stunning look with the amazing wrapping options. It lets your customers to choose their gift boxes, gift cards, wrap able products and send message.
• Magento AJAX cart: Helps reduce time in navigating back and forth during the shopping process, as items can be added to the cart or removed from the cart without having to click the update button. Every addition or deletion of items automatically refreshes the cart. It also helps in customization of the pop up window whenever a change is made to the cart by adding or removing an item from it. You can display cross sell items along with widgets and images, this helps in increasing your sales apart from customer loyalty.
• Magento One Step Checkout: Helps you to reduce the standard Magento six step checkouts to a One step process. With the dynamic AJAX prices and totals of items are automatically updated once the shipping method is selected. It makes the process very customer friendly and easy to use and they have to fill in the shipping address only once as against six times in the previous method.
• Magento Store Pickup: acts as a magento shipping extension that lets customers choose a specific store from your chain of stores to pick up products during checkout

Extensions are the vital tools in Magento development, adding rich features and enabling interfaces. Developers need to follow guidelines for pricing, installing, naming, approval, use of Magento logs in extensions, enterprise extensions, and paid extensions.