Magento Extension Roundup - October 2018

License: Custom
Version Reviewed: 1.0.0

Although Magento 2 supports flat rate shipping, you are limited to a single rate. This can be restrictive when you want to expand your market to other countries or add an alternative shipping service and rate.

This extension augments Magento 2's flat rate shipping method allowing for the definition of up to five flat shipping rates, each of which can be individually enabled or disabled and restricted to a set of countries.

While this extension provides an improvement over the standard single flat rate, it is still limited to a meager finite number. Store owners might do better using the Magento 2 table rate shipping method where they can use the "Price vs. Destination" condition and a simple spreadsheet (CSV) to define more flexible shipping rates.

License: MIT
Version Reviewed: 1.0.1

This extension provides product exclusivity which may be able to help in your customer loyalty program. A new product type "Membership Product" is introduced by this extension where a product of this type can be assigned exclusively to a customer group for a time period. During the configured time period, the product can be purchased only by the selected customer group. Customers can be assigned their membership ID and given a membership expiry date, after which they will be moved to a configured customer group.

This extension is still in its infancy, with only a YouTube video for documentation and configuration settings sprinkled with grammatical errors ("When a customer becomes a Membership, ..."). Its approach to providing exclusivity to customers is simplistic and confusing and may require further polishing for the concept to take off.

License: MIT
Version Reviewed: 1.0.0

This extension allows you to restrict payment methods to specific customer groups. You will need some knowledge in setting up your own custom Magento 2 extension before you can use this extension, because system configuration fields for each payment method (to store which customer groups can use them) will have to be added to a system.xml file. This means you need the list of all the payment methods and have to update the custom extension when you add a new one.

A similar extension linked from the documentation of this one, Customer Group Payment Filters by Galactic Labs, uses a different approach and works out of the box without any additional custom code. Instead of assigning customer groups to payment methods, it allows you to restrict certain payment methods from customer groups. As you can see, this works the other way around and you don't have to know beforehand which payment methods you are going to use. However, this approach is not intuitive to use since you have to edit a customer group to restrict a payment method from them.

License: MIT
Version Reviewed: 1.0.0

If you are one of the many site owners and developers who want to maintain a minimal set of templates and styles for their site, this extension might be of help to you. It allows you to redirect the product review list and individual review pages to the product page. This essentially disables access to the standard review pages, leaving you with fewer pages to maintain.

Allowing redirection to a particular section of the product page with the use of HTML anchors should bring a slight improvement to this simple extension.

When you use this extension and employ a Google product review feed, it might be best to use a the "group" type for the review_url element since the product page will contain a group of reviews and not just a single one.