As you are here, it indicates you are interested in trying your hand in eCommerce development. Various eCommerce platforms are available in the market, and picking one would be a tough job for you.
This post will let you know about Prestashop, one of the popular eCommerce development platforms, features, technical requirements, and more.
Let’s start to know about Prestashop in detail.
What Is Prestashop?
The business model of Prestashop relies on selling services for commercial partners to its customer base, embracing themes and optional add-on features.
Prestashop is easy-to-use and offers a robust, responsive store interface for shoppers. Moreover, it provides a complete set of features free of cost.
Technical Requirements
If you want Prestashop to run properly, the system demands a match with the below technical requirements:
- Apache 2. x, Nginx, or Microsoft IIS web server;
- Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems;
- PHP 5.6+ and MySQL 5.0+ technologies.
- WampServer or EasyPHP for Windows, XAMPP, or Bitnami for Windows, and OS X prepared packages.
Key Features Of Prestashop
PrestaShop comes with 300+ built-in features that allow the user to handle payment methods, product listing, shipping, buyers, and suppliers. It uses a web template system that facilitates one to customize the eStore theme and use add-on modules.
Let’s check out the top features of PrestaShop.
1. Store Builder
Prestashop comes with a WordPress-like dashboard that offers a feature-rich store development interface, embracing navigation, detailed product listings, and search.
2. eMarketing
PrestaShop offers in-built product and catalog SEO integration for search placement optimization. Also, it provides in-built promotions, coupons, email integration, etc.
3. Free & Open Source
PrestaShop is an entirely free and open-source platform that permits users to develop a fully-customizable website in minutes. It makes the eCommerce website development accessible and more manageable.
4. Marketing
This eCommerce platform allows users to add custom features to your site to make it extensive.
5. Easy Customization
The days are gone when we used to have ordinary and dull websites. PrestaShop has many modules to help you customize the website as per your website, and it comes with 5,000 and more modules and themes.
6. Payment Gateways
7. Google Rich Snippets
Google is important for attracting website traffic. So, it needs to know about your website and the services it offers to differentiate your site from others. Resultantly, it can derive traffic to your website hassle-free. And here, you need to use rich snippets to make your site look different from your competitors. Also, you can emerge with an add-on in the PrestaShop marketplace that specifically smoothens this process.
8. Ease Of Use
As the PrestaShop background is more technical, it demands some time to set up. You can understand the process of taking an online demo from PrestaShop demo that embraces both front-end store and back-end office. Also, you can see it on desktop, mobile phone, and tablet with all the required features. You can install PrestaShop and use it easily, and it offers a complete responsive online store faster.
9. Integrations
PrestaShop provides various add-ons and themes, premium support as per your need, and an agent partners’ directory for hire. Also, it offers help to launch a store.
10. Shopping Cart
It integrates with various payment providers, tax rules, and major shipping carriers to meet every shopping need of the customers.
11. Templates
PrestaShop sells various high-quality themes to customize the store professionally and make it look engaging.
12. International
PrestaShop offers 65 language translations for your eStore, embracing flexible currency and shipping rules as per the location. Its cloud administrative dashboard is available in eight languages, Italian, Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, Polish, and Dutch.
13. Mobile
Responsive stores and checkout systems of Prestashop make it useful. Also, its back-end dashboards are responsive for quick management.
14. Cloud or Self Hosting
In the PrestaShop Cloud, you can signup easily and faster for a free store, or you can download the open-source PHP code or host it.
Modules & Themes – Prestashop Customization
Obviously, Prestahop is functional, but sooner or later, you may need some extra features and functions that you will not get with its default version. PrestaShop arrives with a large section of paid and free modules that will assist merchants in extending their site’s functionalities.
The average integration fee ranges from 50 to 100 euros; that’s a competitive price in the modules market. If you have a limited budget, you can simply get a free solution with exceptional quality and outputs.
One more customization aspect is a website design, and here the possibilities are vast. You will find 100+ PrestaShop themes in the market and templates suiting every taste, online store needs, and budget.
Disadvantages Of Prestashop
We have discussed various pros and good factors about PrestaShop, but it’s not like we should pick it up blindly. This eCommerce development platform also comes with some cons. Let’s go through below:
1. Skills Required
To manage PrestaShop at your best, a store admin needs to have specific developer knowledge and the skills it demands to work on it.
2. Additional Costs
The PrestaShop is free, but its domain registration and hosting costs are available at an amount. However, the hosting decision depends entirely on you. So, you can lower such spending. The additional cost of customization services is also highlighted.
3. Incompatible Module
As various teams of developers can create PrestaShop addons, their functionality may interfere with each other. Here, the best solution is only the trial-and-error method, and you need to emerge with a substitute for such cases.
Conclusion
Well, every eCommerce development platform comes with some pros as well as cons. But, we can’t keep them aside because of their disadvantages. We need to choose the one suiting our business needs and the objectives we want to attain.
So, you may consider PrestaShop also if you think it would be best for your online store development.
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