PrestaShop is an e-commerce platform that you can install on your web server in order to sell products to your visitors. PrestaShop is one of the most popular software to create your online store that comes with almost everything that you need to setup your store.
Selling products online has come a long way, and in order to do that successfully you need to have the right kind of e-commerce script running on your website, PrestaShop is one of the most popular ones, let’s see if that’s justified, and what exactly is offered.
The default interface of PrestaShop looks very modern with a slick design and it has a good flow, but since we’re probably gonna change the theme to something unique made just for our site, then this isn’t very important. What’s important is that the software is easily customizable, and PrestaShop certainly is that. Feature list that PrestaShop has is very long, and the developers of it are partnered up with a lot of famous online web shops, like the French Ebay, which is a good indicator of the software quality.
PrestaShop features and characteristics
Each web shop has different needs, and it can sometimes be hard to find the right e-commerce software to use. A list of features usually helps out in these situations, so here it is for PrestaShop:
Catalog Management: managing the inventory is very easy with the help of very advanced Catalog Management tool. You can choose which products are offered, which are displayed, search through products, rearrange the order and a lot more.
Product Display: choose between several different ways of how the product is displayed, how much information is give, how many images and so on.
Advanced Control Panel: it can be seen on the image below. The control panel is very powerful, you can change practically every aspect of the website there. Track payments, orders, employees and of course edit preferences.
Translations/Taxes/Localizations – PrestaShop offers all of the previously mentioned features. By default this web shop comes with English, Spanish, French, Italian and German languages installed. Localization to different taxes and local duties are offered, which is very important for those who plan on running an online store in another country.
Search engine friendly e-store: PrestaShop is one of the few stores out there who can pride itself with the fact that it is SEO friendly. Making a website “likeable” to search engine like Google is the goal of every website owner. PrestaShop developers had this in mind, and they’ve made it very SEO friendly. One example would be links that the script uses, there’s no code there, item names are written inside the link, which should help out with search engines a lot.
System Requirements to Install PrestaShop:
PrestaShop has very basic system requirements, that most of the hosting plans already provide. You can use a Linux or Windows server and ensure it has PHP and MySQL. That’s pretty much it. There are some optional additional components as well that you can install to improve performance and functionality. See details here.
Conclusion
PrestaShop should be, if not anything else, then definitely on the, “to test” list of every website owner that plans on opening a web shop. You have nothing to lose if you want to try it, there’s a demo on the website, and best of all this e-commerce platform is free, so if you want to install it yourself on a test server, you can simply download it and do that, for 0$.