Extensions for more Efficient Store Administration

So your catalog is growing, the sales volume is increasing, and all that means great news for your business. But the joy of watching your business grow can be disheartening, especially when it means more demands for you and your staff.

Compared to manual actions such as adding new products, prices, and order updates, changes to things in the admin area may seem simple. But with increased operation volumes it may take you a good deal of time to scuttle through and keep your head above water.

If you’ve come to the point where you cannot manage the store as you did before, it’s time to add fresh features to your online store to save you lots of time and effort.

But don’t worry, the Magento web developers have added some useful features to the latest Magento 2 platform which were missing in Magento 1 like customizable admin grids, for example, and lots of other goodies designed to make your life easier.

We’ve dug deeper and prepared an overview of extensions from the Magento Marketplace which could improve your experience when dealing with Magento 2 store administration.

Bulk Prices Updater

Standard Magento functionality does not support the option to bulk update prices via the Admin menu. This can be a problem if you’re one of the many merchants whose catalog consists of several hundred or thousands of products that require price adjustments at any given time. Bulk price updater might just be the salvation you’ve been waiting for.

Whichever one you decide on bulk price updater, Mass price update extension, or Mass product actions extension these tools were created to enhance the price management process. Here’s a list of our favorite Magento 2 plugins that have been designed to make your life easier

And, here comes a brief review of Magento 2 plugins we have found so far.

Bulk Prices Updater module encompasses a number of basic features aimed to optimize the price updating process with just a few clicks. Here is a list of some of the options you might benefit from:

• Filter products by categories or other attributes
• Increase or decrease prices via fixed or percentage type changes
• Apply price rounding like Round to integer, Round to integer with ending, or Round ending to threshold
• Update tier and special prices

The Bulk Prices Updater extension is also highly intuitive and simple to configure.

Price Configuration

Products

Another solution is Mass Prices Updater. On top of the features listed above, it also has its own specific feature set such as:

• An extended grid with Special Price, Cost, Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price (MSRP), Tier Price, and Group Price columns
• The ability to edit and save new prices directly in the product grids, which eliminates the need to leave the page and move to the Edit field. A much more seamless process.

The Mass Prices Updater extension is featured with Store Switcher, Products Search line, and Mass Price Actions menu.

Both extensions mentioned above were exclusively created to manage prices in your catalog.

However, on the Magento Marketplace you can find solutions where bulk price update is just one of the provided features.

Mass Product Actions is one of those extensions with a very important function. Alongside mass price management you can delete multiple products, update data (images, custom options etc), and configure product relations all in one batch.

To understand it better, let’s compare two Admin screenshots below: default Magento Products Actions and Mass Product Actions:

Default Magento 2 Products Actions

Mass Product Actions

Bulk Prices Updater, Mass Prices Updater, Mass Product Actions or any other extension might not be the shining silver bullet to help manage and simplify every kind of business. But depending on your eCommerce needs, and taking into consideration all the pros and cons, it’s easy to choose the one that will suit your web store in the best way possible.

Mass Order Actions

Just another smart way to reduce time spent on Magento store management at your fingertips: updating order statuses in bulk.

There are a few solutions on the Magento Marketplace which you could absolutely consider for bulk order management like Mass Order Actions, Simplify Bulk Order Processing and Mass Order Processing.

Frankly speaking, all the modules mentioned here are relatively newly released extensions, so there is still the same chance that you will face some challenges with perfect integration at the beginning. But rest assured, we’ll do whatever we can to make sure it works for you and your store.

Mass Order Actions plugin is available for both Magento 1 and Magento 2 versions, and has successfully resonated with Magento 1 users. That is the very reason we’ve chosen this extension to be overviewed in our article.

Mass Order Actions module was mainly designed for you to get rid of manual order processing, so it enables you to:

• Edit orders or order statuses in a batch directly in the order grid
• Manage invoices, shipping, and tracking numbers right in the order grid
• Apply combination of actions for the orders selected

But that’s not all for this extension, our favorite part about this one? A customizable order grid! You can tailor it to your every need depending on actions you frequently carry out.

Simplify Bulk Order Processing and Mass Order Processing modules have very similar functionality. What really matters here is choosing the extension which has already been tested by experienced Magento customers, as well opting for the company with the best reputation on the Magento extensions marketplace.

Order Eraser / Order Archive

Another group of extensions, which could be a real savior for you when managing orders, is one that makes it possible to delete orders out of the Admin panel. Magento 2, as well as Magento 1, does not have this feature on a default basis. However, it may be the case that you strongly need to remove, for example, cancelled orders or test orders, in order to have a clear vision of the orders which are currently being processed. Or perhaps there are several managers who deal with orders in one Admin panel, so it could be a challenge to seamlessly manage all the orders.

Another addition to the Magento Marketplace is a few extensions designed to delete odd or extraneous orders. Let’s take a look at what this may mean, and how it may benefit you and your store.

The Order Eraser plugin enables you to clean your order list (together with linked data and invoices) and remove those which aren’t needed.

However, kindly keep in mind that if you delete orders and all related data, there is no way to restore it and order information will no longer be available. With that in mind, all orders should be double checked before being deleted.

If this seems a bit too permanent for you, there is another extension called Order Archive, which is perfect for you. Order Archive makes it possible not only to delete unwanted orders but also archive them for later access. What does it actually mean?

It means that you hide orders you do not currently need from the order grid, giving you the option to can access and restore them at a later date if necessary.

Additionally, you can archive orders by order status or order data in bulk; another great way to save time and increase efficiency.

While this extension functionality sounds pretty attractive, it should be noted that both extensions (as is the case with many other extensions for the Magento 2 platform) are rather new. This means that in the beginning, the chances of perfect functionality from the start isn’t quite 100%. But bear in mind that the functionality mentioned above is possible and with a little bit of patience, trial and error, can be applied and implemented to your Magento 2 web store.

Multi Warehouse Inventory

When considering more comprehensive solutions for your webstore, we can’t help but stress the importance of an Admin functionality so crucial as Inventory Management. If you are a merchant who runs multiple warehouses, then you might have experienced issues when operating multiple stocks which are scattered across different locations.

Magento core functionality does not make it possible to manage several storages simultaneously, so this is a challenge for merchants who depend on several warehouses to distribute-to-store, and simply distribute their products. In this case a reliable add-on is definitely a must-have feature.
Out of those solutions we have found on the Magento marketplace, the most reviewed and preferable one is Multi Warehouse Inventory. So, let’s see why it is so popular among Magento customers.

The plugin is designed to create and manage more than one warehouse within one Magento installation. It provides Magento admins with the ability to:

• Distribute inventory among several stock locations
• Monitor product stock in each warehouse
• Use the grid to manage stock information
• Associate warehouses with specific customer groups like guest visitors, wholesalers, retailers etc as well as with different store views (for multilingual stores)
• Apply custom shipping rates and methods for each warehouse

Additionally, on the Manage Warehouses configuration page you can find a lot of extra options to tune up processes concerned with the operation of warehouses like: specifying warehouse location, data and priority, assigning products to a warehouse you choose, and managing their stock.

So, as you can see, running multiple warehouses is a hard nut to crack, so having a good set of tools at hand could definitely make warehouse management easier and more transparent.

Here we outlined only a few of the plugins available. At the same time, with a clear vision of how you need it to work, you can look for solutions with other features, or order one to be developed specifically for your business.

It is no news that Magento CMS is the platform which can be limitlessly customized to suit your every need. While there is no perfect ready-made solution to suit every taste and budget, all management steps need to be well estimated before implementing something new. Should you have any questions or ideas you’d like to bring to life, just drop us a line.