Top 10 Chrome Extensions for Business Owners

This article was written by HeiKin Wong

Starting and maintaining a business is challenging, especially if you own a start-up. As an owner of a small business, you will be respoadcnsible for both crucial and mundane tasks. Whether it’s time management or coming up with cost-saving measures, these are all tasks that could take your attention away from something more important for the growth of your company. So why don’t you get the computer to do it for you? There are hundreds of productivity and cost-saving extensions on chrome that a business owner can utilize to make their life much easier. Here’s our pick for the top 10 chrome extensions that can best increase your productivity and save some money.

Best Cost-saving Extensions

1. Honey

While many know Honey as a great cost-saving chrome extension for your general consumers, its usefulness is equally valid for business owners. Once Honey is installed on your chrome it will automatically apply coupon codes whenever you shop online. The newest version also compares prices of the same product from other sites to amazon. These functions are especially useful if you are a retailer or if you want to acquire tools for your business at the best available price. If reducing cost is what you are looking for then consider checking out our article on Tax Reduction for business in Japan.

2. Fakespot

If you are a business owner that needs to purchase supplies on a regular basis, then Fakespot is a must-have. As the name suggests, it tells you whether there are fake reviews on an item you are looking to purchase. This is extremely beneficial for the business owner who needs to make an informed decision on which product to purchase. The worst thing to have is for a business owner to purchase a piece of expensive equipment only for it to break a few months later. Knowing whether you have purchased the right product could save you the money and the trouble of buying the same thing again.
Fakespot also has a filer that gives you the most useful review for a given product, which could save you the time of going through a long list of reviews.

3. Keepa

A crucial app for business owners who does business on Amazon, Keepa keeps track of price drops for any products you highlighted. When it detects a price drop it will notify you through the extension. This is useful for business owners who want to get an item for the company at a discounted price. It is equally useful for those who sell their products on amazon as you could use Keepa to track any price drop from your competitors.

Best Productivity Chrome extensions

4. Todoist

Used by 10 million people worldwide, Todoist is one of the most popular productivity apps on the market. It helps you keep track of all your tasks and reminds you before they are due. Whether it’s an important meeting or just weekly company events, Todoist can free your mind of the burden of remembering all those tasks and help you focus on your current task. Another phenomenal feature of Todoist is the ability to collaborate with others. You can set up a reminder for the whole team and direct them to the necessary documents without needing them to set their own reminder. This is also why Todoist is popular among small businesses. It increases productivity for the whole team and makes sure everyone is on the same page.

A final unique advantage that Todoist has is its vast integration with other storage and productivity apps. It is integrated with apps like Google Drive, Slack, and Evernote that could further increase your productivity and help manage all your documents and information a lot better. The free version has a lot of features and the loading speeds are much faster than other task management apps.

5. LastPass

In an age where your Google account password can be more important than your bank password, Lastpass is almost a must-have for those who spend a considerable amount of time on the internet. This is true especially for online business owners or those who use online tools to keep track of a company’s operation. With access to digital accounting tools as easy as they are now, it is not uncommon to find a company’s entire operation and data is saved online. This makes protecting (and remembering) passwords to your productivity tools of the highest importance. That being said, remembering a dozen passwords for each of the productivity tools is unrealistic, and setting every site to a single password is too dangerous. This is where a password manager comes into play.

With LastPass, all you have to do is remember the password for your password manager, the extension will automatically fill the credentials for any website it remembers. Using the autofill function from the password manager also has a unique advantage. LastPass can help its users discover phishing websites that try to obtain your information. This is because the extension only auto-fills the website you have visited before. If you are on a similar phishing site the auto-fill simply would not work, which would tell you that you are on a fake site.

6. Black Menu for Google

This chrome extension is especially useful if you are using multiple Google services in your business. The black menu gives you easy access to all of Google’s services through a top-down menu. It allows you to do a quick search, manage your Gmail, and have speedy access to Google Drive. The extension also allows for a great deal of customization on what you want on the new black menu. You would see a notable increase in your productivity if your business revolves around the use of Google services.

7. Loom for Chrome

Loom is an extremely effective tool for businesses to communicate in a remote environment. With remote work becoming more common in recent years, the ability to show and tell your employees what you want and the task at hand is crucial to running an efficient online business. However, installing the Loom application on your computer is often a tedious process and could slow down your PC. WIth the Loom extension for chrome, you can record your voice and your browser without installing Loom. Recording your chrome screen is an easy way to get your employees up to date without typing a long email that might not get the point through. Sending your message through this chrome extension not only makes sure you would get the correct message through a demonstration on chrome but also saves you the time of typing an email that describes the task needed to be done.

Finally, the free version allows you to save up to 25 videos and you can delete videos you have made in the past to keep under this limit.

8. Session Buddy

Have you ever had a busy day searching for different items and working on different tasks on multiple chrome tabs, only to find that you have opened over 40 chrome tabs and now your computer runs like a turtle? Then what you need is Session Buddy. A rather lite chrome extension, it does a few simple yet crucial things that can help you manage your chrome tabs. First, it allows the user to group and save chrome tabs and can be restored later. This feature provides you with the ability to free up computer memory and avoid having tabs open that are unrelated to your current work. Second, it has a new menu that allows you to see all of your tabs in one place. Seeing all the tabs at once allows you to remove potentially duplicated tabs and remove used tabs, further removing clutter from your browser.

Additionally, you can also search for a specific tab you have opened and quickly navigate to said tab. Needless to say, this is an exceedingly handy tool that could increase your productivity if your work requires you to open many windows at a single time.

9. Inbox When Ready for Gmail

This is a simple chrome extension that changes Gmail in subtle ways that could improve your productivity, especially if you receive a dozen emails a day. With these Chrome extensions, you can decide when Gmail would send you notifications of incoming emails and how many times you can look at your Gmail. This allows you to focus on your work at hand without being distracted by new conversations and tasks. It also gives you the opportunity to batch process your emails and optimize the time you spend on communication. Finally, the extension itself is non-intrusive and has no access to your emails, so you can safely use the extension without worrying about leaks and privacy.

10. Check My Links

This is the perfect chrome extension for web developers and online content creators. This chrome extension basically does what it said. It will check whether the links you have on your web browser and look for links that are broken. This is exceedingly useful as web designers and content creators often need to embed dozens of links on the webpage or an article. Checking all of these links to see if they are alive or not is quite a hassle and using these tools saves a bit of time each time you create new content.

Don’t like Chrome? Here are some browsers that also work with chrome extensions.

We know that chrome is not for everyone. Whether it’s the intrusive private policy or the excessive memory usage, some business owners simply prefer other browsers over chrome. That does not mean you will have to give up the benefits that chrome extensions provide though. Some browsers are also based on the Chromium system and chrome extensions will work just fine on these browsers. Let’s take a look at some popular browsers used by business owners and consumers alike.

Microsoft Edge

The latest browser from Microsoft is, ironically, built on the Chromium system. It has gained quite a bit of popularity over the years and is now the second most popular browser that is based on the chromium source code. Microsoft Edge does perform significantly better than Chrome in terms of memory usage, if memory is a concern then switching to Microsoft Edge can give your computer a good performance boost. This could mean faster loading times and a small increase in productivity (as opposed to staring at the screen and while for the tab to load in Chrome) Microsoft Edge also offers additional features like being able to take notes on webpages and has a feature that reads out everything on the webpage for you, both features that chrome needs an extension for.

Brave

The Brave browser is for business owners who are extremely concerned with privacy and security. It is an open-source browser based on the Chromium system. Brave automatically blocks ads and website trackers and has a faster loading time than Chrome. It also has a great private browsing mode that would hide your IP address thus increasing anonymity. Since it’s built on the Chromium system, every chrome extension will work on the Brave browser. That being said, Brave’s native features are lacking compared to Chrome and Microsoft Edge due to its goal of maximizing security and privacy. That means you will need to install more extensions if you wish to enjoy the same features provided on other browsers.

Conclusion

With the trend of remote work being accelerated by the pandemic, your web browser has become one of the key tools to access and operate businesses online. Having the tools that will help you save some cash or make your life easier goes a long way to increase the cost and efficiency of your business. At the same time, it is also a source of endless distraction, so having chrome extensions that help you focus on important work could drastically increase your productivity.

Want to scale your business in Japan but are running out of ideas? Check out our article on the Top 10 Japanese Business YouTube Channels to learn more!

Top 10 Japanese Business YouTube Channels