Saturday, January 30, 2010

Introduction to Prestashop

Prestashop: Introduction

Prestashop is a free application to setup your business online. It is a professional open source software which will help you in setting up an online store in a few minutes. It is an open source e-commerce solution and a shopping cart solution. It is available under the Open Software Licence and officially launched in August 2007 for small to medium-sized businesses. Well there are a lot of open source shopping cart softwares (Like OSCommerce, Zencart, Magento etc) But I prefer Prestashop over the others because of its simplicity, ease of use, and many advanced features which are lacking in its other competitors.

So if you have a small to medium sized business, and if you want to take your business online, in minutes then “Prestashop” can be the one stop solution to all your needs. Being an open source software, its code is available to its users which can be easily edited to change the look and feel of the whole application.

Setting up an online store using Prestashop is very easy. It really doesn’t require any knowledge on HTML, CSS etc to setup your online store using Prestashop. However if you want to modify the look of your online store, you need to have a little knowledge on HTML and CSS. There is no need to worry even if you don’t know HTML and CSS. There are hundreds of free themes available which you can choose and download for your online store which can help you in changing the look of your online store.

Apart from free themes, there are numerous modules on prestashop which can help you in adding some extra functionality to your online shopping store. Most of the modules are available for free download, which can be easily integrated with your online store (your website). Prestashop modules are basically small pieces of code (written in PHP, MYSQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX etc) which when integrated with your online store can add some extra functionality to Prestashop. These modules are made by the developers and the Prestashop community. So even if you have a good knowledge of PHP, MYSQL, etc, you can modify an existing module or you can also create a new one to add some extra functionality to prestashop.


Why Prestashop

Despite its technical sophistication and advanced functionality, the PrestaShop e-Commerce Solution is very light (around 6 MB), so it's easy to download, install, and update. PrestaShop is so lightweight and speedy, even customers with slow connection speeds will enjoy buying from your online shopping store.

You will appreciate PrestaShop's easy-to-use Back Office tool for adding and fine-tuning the storefronts (Front Office). With new & sophisticated Back-Office functionality added regularly, shop owners don't need to rely on others to make their Front Office look and act the way they want it to.
Developers appreciate the clean structure of PrestaShop code that they can easily adapt to their client's needs for quick turn-around. Thanks to its use of CSS and transplantable module blocks, the PrestaShop e-Commerce Solution can be customized for small or medium-sized businesses working within tight deadlines.
PrestaShop Frontend and Backend
The following shows the two visible interfaces of PrestaShop.

Frontend(The Web Store Front and use the default PrestaShop Theme)
The frontend is the public vies of your web store with which your customers can interact through a standard web browser. It presents your products , product Categories and promotions and provides your customers with ordering , payment and purchase tracking features.
An example is shown below:

Backend (The Back Office)
The backend is the password-protected view of the back office features that enable a web store administrator to setup the products and purchasing options and to manage Orders and all other store functionalities .A view of the backend is shown below.


Prestashop comes with a lot of built in features. To explore the complete list of features provided by Prestashop, visit the following link: http://www.prestashop.com/en/features
To know more about Prestashop, visit the following link: http://www.prestashop.com/

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