If you are in the ecommerce industry it’s natural to look to companies that are where you want to go and borrow functionality to implement into your own system. The team at Silverthemes.com, a vendor of premium Magento commerce themes, widgets and add-ons, have put together a great add-on called “Magento Vertical Menu” which they modeled on the functionality from Walmart.com.
Screenshot of Walmart.com Vertical Menu functionality
Screenshot of SilverThemes.com Vertical Menu functionality
Cons of using the Magento Vertical Menu add-on
Size of your ecommerce site – This add-on was really designed for online retailers looking for a better way to showcase a wide number of categories in a very ”user friendly” way. If you run a smaller ecommerce website with fewer categories the functionality may not benefit your business as much as using it on a larger ecommerce site with more products and categories.
Optimized to work with SilverThemes Magento Themes – Because SilverThemes built this add-on they have optimized it to work exclusively with their themes. If you buy another Magento Theme for your site from a different Magento Theme vendor it may be harder to implement and use this add-on for your business’ needs. This is not clear from SilverThemes.com as to how it will operate with another non-SilverThemes.com ecommerce theme but you can rest assured that SilverThemes.com is one of the best Magento Theme, Widget and Addon Vendors around currently.
Pros of using the Magento Vertical Menu add-on
Very Browser Compatible – I tested the Magento Vertical Menu add-on using Mozilla Firefox (3.0.12), IE (6.0.2900.2180) and Google Chrome (2.0.172.39). What I noticed in IE is that it takes longer for the mouse over to generate the Vertical Menu however once it pops up it works the same way as in the other web browsers mentioned. Usability in IE could be an issue as it is with most things JavaScript in IE.
Excellent Price – The price is very reasonable for companies that are looking to implement this functionality into their ecommerce website and this is an attractive feature for any company running Magento Commerce to support their online ecommerce sales channels.
Overall it’s a great add-on that SilverThemes team has developed and designed. The only concerns that can be raised about using this add-on with a Magento Commerce site are optimize issue and compatibility with IE and how it could affect the functionality of this add-on. The Magento Vertical Menu is available from SilverThemes.com and sells for a very reasonable price of $99.00. Check it out in action by clicking here.
