PrestaShop: eCommerce Platform’s Pros and Cons

Building your online shop is neither a simple nor a cheap task. Yet, using PrestaShop, it can become one.

Free, qualitative, and open-source – this is what distinguishes the PrestaShop platform from all the other competitors. It offers either ready-made options for beginning users or tools for experienced developers, who want to rewrite the source code under their eCommerce needs.

And now, PrestaShop eCommerce websites have become even more convenient, as we’re glad to announce easy-to-install PayOp plugin for your shop. Use it to receive payments from your happy customers quickly and smoothly, without compromising security or service quality of your website!

Being an open-source tool, PrestaShop allows creating eCommerce websites for free. Its outstanding feature is scalability, which means that merchants are able to set up the platform with the particularly required functionality – from basic to advanced one.

For those merchants, who have a superficial understanding of website creation, PrestaShop would be the perfect introduction to eCommerce. On the most basic level, PrestaShop doesn’t require merchant expertise, yet, thanks to its scalability and open code, it will uncover its abilities for sophistication in the hands of professional developers.

So, you basically have two options: install and use a rich free feature set of Prestashop website, or hire a team of experts, who will utilize the code to build a customized shop with unique components.

Usually, merchants find the basic functions set of the platform quite extensive as soon as it is specifically tailored for online shops creation. The inbuilt set of tools includes:

• shopping cart and order form
• sorting filters for products
• marketing and basic SEO tools for the website promotion
• statistic reports on the sales
• import of CSV files, thanks to which you can quickly fill in your catalog of products

To get a full understanding of how websites using PrestaShop look like, you can check the list of all the online shops built in PrestaShop and make sure that the platform can handle even the most complex website structures.

All the additional instruments are available in the specialized PrestaShop marketplace. There a merchant can find Prestashop addons of all sorts for promotional, communication, systematization needs. Yet, unlike the platform itself, the addons in the shop are developed by users, who don’t share their work for free. Prices vary: you can find free themes and plugins for your shop, as well as cool & complex tools whose price starts from 30€ and goes up to 300€ for pro add-ons.

Prestashop is often called a solution for merchants who outgrown OpenCart. And while it takes a comparatively small percent of the eCommerce market (9% compared to 33% borrowed by WooCommerce), it has a set of unique features that are highly valued by its users.

PayOp has plugins for all three systems, be it OpenCart, WooCommerce, or Prestashop – you can easily implement them on your website to receive quick international transfers from your customers. To decide which one is more suitable for your business case, you should orient on:

• budget
• size of the shop (therefore, the estimated load on hosting servers)
• marketing tools required (SEO, statistics, retargeting, etc.)

Talking about the cost of making your website, PrestaShop pricing is suitable for merchants with different budgets. You can always stick up with free functional and design themes. Yet, if you want your shop to be recognizable, you can spend some money to provide your customers with a unique shopping experience.

Products Presentation

Websites using PrestaShop are made for a simple yet catchy presentation of saleable goods. One of the features that make PrestaShop so popular among all the other open-source eCommerce platforms is the possibility to upload and present as many items as you need without paying a cent.

PrestaShop has everything a merchant may need to optimize their search and improve their user experience. The list includes:

• support of dozens of languages
• dynamic shopping cart
• practical display of each item – its name, features and manufacturer’s name are accessible from a general website’s overview
• ability to categorize and sort products, present “Recommended” items
• possibility to format titles and fonts, visually emphasize certain products

..and many other features and possibilities for customization. Moreover, to boost the UX and, consequently, your sales, you can use numerous retargeting and remarketing tools on the PrestaShop marketplace, which was mentioned earlier.

Payment Methods

PrestaShop doesn’t offer its own payment gateway. To set up a seamless payment acquiring method, you can stick up with the PayOp plugin for PrestaShop, which is now available for all merchants!

With it, you’ll receive a faultless solution for PrestaShop payment obtaining. We offer constant technical support for this product, so if you face any problems considering its installation, make sure to contact us for qualified assistance. With PayOp plugin, your website will be available to customers from all over the world – hence, it is a perfect opportunity to expand your business and conquer new markets.