PrestaShop is an engine designed for content management on online store sites. It is suitable for medium and small. It has more than 310 standard features to quickly create a fully working website. On this CMS at the moment works about 300 thousand active online stores.
Important features – a large number of ready-made templates for stores, free access to full functionality and an unlimited number of products that can be added to the catalog.
Users appreciated the rich functionality “out of the box” – a lot of extensions, which makes it possible to create a website with minimal knowledge. Immediately available analytics of sales, orders, average check, visits, conversions. Search engine optimization at all levels is also available. The separation of user rights and built-in payment modules are very convenient.
All this is important for a new online store, but the existing ones will not mind to save money by switching to PrestaShop.
Pros and cons of PrestaShop
CMS has many advantages, some not available in other engines. Specifically:
- Ease of installation. You will need to download the installation file from the official site, upload it to the admin panel of the site and then follow the clear instructions. The installation file is small, so it can be downloaded even with a slow connection.
- Price. Free platform is one of the most important arguments in favor of PrestaShop. You do not need an online merchant license to install the store.
- Ease of use. Clear interface and simplicity ensures that even a beginner will understand the functioning of the engine. You do not need any special knowledge and skills to launch an online store. Monitor and maintain the performance of the site without problems. Today PrestaShop has more than 25000 plugins available.
- Easy customization. You can adapt CMS to the needs of a particular site, because the system is very flexible. Set and remove customizations based on your needs.
- Tools for customer retention: base, mailings with promotional offers, work through social networks.
- Global coverage. Support is provided in 70+ languages. Online store on PrestaShop in USA, India, Germany, China, UK, Japan, Canada have shown its effectiveness.
- Integration with Google Analytics – get detailed statistics of site visits.
- Payment reliability. This is one of the most important advantages for e-commerce. For your site you can connect a reliable payment gateway and install different payment methods. For example: PayPal, Skrill, Klarna, Bitcoin, Payments and others. When making a payment, there is no redirection to an external resource – the user remains on the payment page.
- Plus PrestaShop has ready-made solutions. Especially relevant are free advertising tools, such as automation of tracking emails, promotional offers, vouchers.
There are disadvantages in PrestaShop too, although they are much less than advantages. The first problem is the limited scalability. The engine is good for small and medium-sized businesses, but for large projects its capabilities are not enough.
The second disadvantage is too simple design. On the one hand – this is good, because it is easy to find the required sections of the online store. On the other hand – for large businesses CMS PrestaShop is too simple, it may seem that the site does not look professional.
