About Prestashop

If you have an online business, then probably you have heard of Prestashop. In itself, Prestashop is open source software that has been coded in PHP and is used as an e-commerce platform by online stores worldwide. Prestashop operates on many current operating systems. However, most often, Prestashop users prefer hosting the software using Apache servers. It is important to note that the database system of Prestashop is built on MySQL and as a result, Prestashop is dynamic and powerful just like the commonly well known Content Management Systems.
Prestashop has various features that make it a cutting edge e-commerce technology. Some of these features include:

  • Marketing tools
  • Referencing optimization
  • 38 Languages
  • Google Analytics Intergration
  • PDF Order Forms and Invoices

While setting up a website for Prestashop, the software gives its users the option to either customize templates or use the existing Prestashop templates. As such, a business owner is empowered to use his own custom made template and make it as unique as he pleases. However, the process of customizing Prestashop is not easy and will often take a lot of time and resources. It is for this reason that most business owners prefer using existing Prestashop templates for their websites.

Why Choose Prestashop?

According to statistics, there are over one hundred thousand online stores that are utilising Prestashop for their e-commerce sites. Research also indicates that Prestashop is growing in fame by the day and this begs many to ask why people Prestashop hosting is gaining fame among business owners. Here are some of the reasons:

  • Prestashop offers an integrated open source e-commerce shopping cart that has over a period of time become the favorite of many business owners. As such, Prestashop has become a big preference to online stores dealing with sales.
  • Prestashop provides a Search Engine friendly platform such that goods sold on its platform are easy to locate through Search Engine systems. As a result, many businesses have come to prefer it for their operations.
  • The fact that Prestashop is open source means that it is free and this cuts down on the budget for owning an e-commerce software for online stores.
  • Prestashop also comes with complete built in modules. This means that it is easy to set up and run the online stores. Its themes and galleries are designed in such a manner that makes it easy for a business to set up quickly and easily. For this, most business owners often prefer Prestashop to other e-commerce platforms.


Prestashop Hosting Advantages

Easy management and control

Prestashop increases the independence of business owners by ensuring that they are enabled to manage their stores without programming skills. It does this through provision of Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) that enable a user to have full control over the program.

Search Engine Support

This is one of the major advantages of Prestashop. By supporting Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it is easy to attract visitors to a Prestashop site and make sales. However, this will depend upon the keywords selected by the online business owner.

Design Adaptation

Prestashop has the ability to adapt to your customized theme without affecting the structure of the website and without the interference with the content at the backend. Therefore, the whole Prestashop website is able to adapt to design customization.

Prestashop Hosting Disadvantages

Few Marketing features and Modules

When Prestashop is compared with other e-commerce software programs, it stands out to have fewer marketing features and modules than the rest of the e-commerce software. Modules for Prestashop are also expensive to acquire as most of them do not come for free.

Lack of scalability

Even though Prestashop can handle small stores pretty well, it lacks the resources to handle a full scale shopping website. For larger sites more powerful solutions such as Magento are recommended. Worse still, it also lacks a multi user interface.