Prestashop

Prestashop Review

Prestashop is a free CMS for e-commerce born in 2007 as an academic project and particularly suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises, it helps them manage and create simple but effective online stores.

Today, online sales are essential and e-commerce is gaining more and more importance in the world of sales. Even those who own a physical store invest in online platforms to increase their earnings; moreover, today almost half of consumers make purchases online and, taking into account the competition, it is important thate-commerce is a tool designed correctly and managed in such a way as to allow the whole process purchase goes smoothly.

Main features

Among the main features of Prestashop, there is the possibility of accessing the open source code of the platform which allows you to make changes and additions that more adapt to the specific needs of the user. Knowledge of the code, although useful, is not necessary as the CMS has a very intuitive interface; the very clear category system also allows beginners to navigate the online sales system.
Another very useful feature of this platform is that the pages, the products and the product sheets can be optimized from an SEO perspective by inserting titles, descriptions, alternative text of the images, etc…

It can customize the interface and change the arrangement of the elements on the page in an unlimited way, deciding modules, extensions and templates. You can decide offers, payment methods, shipping methods and even organize the warehouse as you wish.
Prestashop is among the fastest platforms in its category with SSL certified security levels for communications and transactions.

Among the features to encourage e-commerce sales, there is for example, the possibility of viewing a product preview, promote products through customizable promotional banners, insert related products on the order confirmation page to get cross-selling,  you can set up the product sheet to increase conversions with advanced filters for product search (price, color, manufacturer, etc.), complete reports to check sales trends with data analysis and statistics and much more.

Integrations and add-ons

Prestashop, as already mentioned at the beginning, is totally free, however it must be emphasized that only the basic platform is free, while the integrations and add-ons useful for making work an e-commerce at its best, they are paid.
This solution can be very convenient because you can choose the integration that best suits the needs of your shop, but some add-ons have decidedly high prices such as for example addons for Amazon which are around €300.

Even as regards the templates, basic models are provided which can be changed with other paid models based on the type of store. Even the themes for customizing e-commerce have considerable costs (around €100/200), which dampens the enthusiasm for the free nature of the project a bit…
This great variety of integrations, however, if on the one hand it allows a great choice on the other hand it could cause problems, since these components are released by hundreds of different developers and therefore may not work well together; moreover, too many external components could cause problems to the site and since many integrations have various developers, Prestashop is not always able to help in case of problems.

PROS

• Lightweight and fast platform.
• Free.
• Great variety of addons.

CONS

• Not suitable for e-commerce that have to manage a large number of products.
• Addons not always compatible with each other and quite expensive.

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