PrestaShop: eCommerce Shopping Cart Review
One of the issues facing users who are looking to start an online shop using an ecommerce shopping cart service is the trade-off between design flexibility and ease of use. While these two things aren’t always mutually exclusive, in most cases services classified under one of two categories: the full-service providers like BigCommerce, Volusion and 3DCart who offer lots of pre-made design templates and appeal to users who are looking to run a site without having to worry about HTML or CSS programming, and services like FoxyCart, that provide a minimal back-end and allow users to more or less build their stores entirely from the ground up. PrestaShop falls into the latter category, with the additional difference of being open source. What differentiates PrestaShop, then, from other open source shopping cart services, such as Magento?
Prestashop Overview
As an open-source shopping cart service, PrestaShop is free to download and use. The company behind PrestaShop, in addition to accepting donations, also offers a separate, paid hosting service called PrestaBox. The PrestaShop software continues to add features thanks to the contributions of PrestaShop’s own developers as well as a worldwide development community. Thanks to this community, PrestaShop is available in a much wider variety of languages than even most of the commercial shopping cart packages.
Prestashop Features
Users might expect an open source package to be much lighter on features than its commercial competitors, and while it’s true that out of the box PrestaShop isn’t quite as robust as the likes of BigCommerce or 3DCart, potential users will probably be surprised at the variety of things PrestaShop is ready to do without any alterations. PrestaShop doesn’t put any limit on the number of products, categories, shipping methods, payment methods, or currencies you can use, and support for PayPal payments is offered pre-configured with a separate (but also free) download. PrestaShop also features integration with Google Analytics, in addition to its own solid but unspectacular statistics tracking capabilities. The developers also offer a service called PrestaStore, where users can purchase additional extensions and templates. Some of these can be pretty expensive for newcomers, but at the same time, they do represent the opportunity to expand your PrestaShop-backed store in ways that aren’t possible with other shopping cart services. Most notably, PrestaShop should appeal to European vendors, as among these add-ons are a number of Europe-specific payment modules, the majority of which are not available from any other provider at this time.
Ease of Use
Using PrestaShop effectively requires that you either have experience in HTML, PHP, and CSS programming, or are working with someone who does. Users without programming expertise and/or the funds to hire a developer will probably want to stick with one of the shopping cart providers that offers a greater number of design templates. That being said, from a developer’s perspective, PrestaShop offers plenty of flexibility and will most likely allow you to do just about whatever you want with the design and functionality of your store. Compared to another major open source shopping cart program, Magento, PrestaShop is a bit more developer-friendly and seems to have a more active community. Magento has more pre-made themes available, but if you’re already set on building your store from scratch, PrestaShop is probably the way to go, thanks to its clean design.
Conclusion
As an open source solution, PrestaShop offers certain advantages and drawbacks. Users who want to be able to get a store up and running with a minimum of fuss should probably stick with the likes of BigCommerce, Volusion, or 3DCart. However, if you want to have total control over the look and feel of your store and are ready to put in the necessary work, PrestaShop represents a flexible, versatile option that does a good job of handling the basics of ecommerce, while leaving the details up to you.