What Are PrestaShop Pros and Cons?

PrestaShop is a free open-source eCommerce solution that is used by over 125,000 active store owners. Its community is one of the biggest and consists of over 350,000 members. Taking into account that it appears only in 2007, it is gaining its popularity very fast.

PrestaShop is full of different useful features that allow you and your customers enjoy simple and reliable online shopping. Let’s take a look at PrestaShop as a whole.

What PrestaShop offers

PrestaShop has a lot of valuable features from site management to translations.

The installation of PrestaShop is really very simple. You should download files and upload them to your host. Just note that for proper functioning PrestaShop requires PHP5 (or later) with MySQL5 (or later).

It is really flexible as it can be easily customized by the store owner. Administrator can add or delete different features without any problem. Changing the theme will not influence the structure. The interface is intuitive and user-friendly, but at the same time design of the default theme needs to be improved.

PrestaShop SEO allows a store owner to be sure that the store is visible to search engines. Google sitemap is automatically generated as well as robots.txt and .htaccess. Provide meta tags and meta description in order to increase your pagerank. There are many useful marketing features such as: refer a friend, affiliate and loyalty programs, coupons and vouchers. But, actually some other shopping carts offer more advanced features for marketing.

One of the key features is that PrestaShop is multilingual and it is translated into more than 41 languages. It definitely widens the geography of PrestaShop users and makes it more popular. On the other hand, multiple currencies support will give your customers an opportunity to buy products and pay for it with their national currency.

Powerful security allows you to set up different file permissions. PrestaShop is compatible with SSL certificates and PCI compliance friendly. One of the positive aspects is that you can see how the store works. PrestaShop demo store is available on PrestaShop website. Before downloading it, you can see how the store functions. To be more precise you can browse both storefront and admin panel.

PrestaShop lacks the built-in export tool. That means you cannot export your products to a csv or other file. What you can do is find the additional modules for PrestaShop to perform data export. Speaking about import, PrestaShop has a built-in tool. Very often merchants want to import xml to their stores. Unfortunately, PrestaShop xml import is not supported by built-in tool. It can perform the data import only from csv files. To extend PrestaShop import functionality with File2Cart you can try free demo import of your csv, xml, excel and txt data file to your PrestaShop catalogue.

Summary

In general, PrestaShop is a popular shopping cart. It has a great multinational community and a high-qualified developers team. Of course, nothing is perfect and PrestaShop marketing, interface, export and import will be developed more and more. But comparing to other shopping carts, PrestaShop offers a lot of beneficial features. Powerful SEO, security and its flexibility make PrestaShop very strong in our competitive e-commerce world.