E-commerce allows us to exchange products and services electronically and there is nothing to worry about time or distance. E-commerce has expanded rapidly. So it became difficult for E-sellers to start a small medium business with the right E-commerce software especially when there are a lot of them to choose from. E-sellers considers Open Source Strategy to incorporate to their online shop as they gets many benefits. Open Source e-commerce software provides cost benefits as there are no license fees, support through communities/forums, agility, superior features and securities. There are some important points that e-sellers should consider when choosing one, like the features available, ease of set up, ease of use, trusted payment gateways, help available all along from start to finish.
Here its about one of the fastest growing carts, Prestashop which is comparatively new in the market. Prestashop targets small and medium sized business with great features and pretty admin area to manage stock updates, orders placed, shipping, carriers, and customers in real time for an E-seller.
Prestashop comes with many features for frontend and back end. A few of them are
Front end:
- Special deals (price reductions, gift vouchers)
- Featured products ,Top sellers and New items on homepage
- ‘Free shipping’ offers
- Cross-selling (Accessories)
- Product image zoom
- Order out-of-stock items
- Customer subscription & user accounts
- Payment by bank wire
- Cash-On-Delivery (COD)
- Gateways for Paypal, Moneybookers, hipay
- Google checkout
- Multiple-recipient contact form
- Product tagging & tag cloud
- Merchandise return (RMAs) & credit slips
- Package tracking
- Offer gift-wrapping & recycled packaging
- PDF customer invoice
- Shopping Cart recall
- Sale of services & virtual goods
- Custom Favicon
- RSS feed
- Newsletter opt-in
- ‘Pick up in-store’ option
- ‘Pick up in-store’ option
- Customized product (text and images)
- Wishlist
- Loyal customer program
- Affiliate program
- Sponsor-a-friend benefit program
- Customer product reviews
Back-end
Comprises your administrator panel
- Unlimited categories & subcategories
- Full-featured WYSIWYG text editor
- Unlimited product attribute combinations,product specs
- Unlimited images with automatic resizing & file optimization
- Unlimited currencies, tax settings and Tax by state, country, both, zones, or no taxes
- Unlimited carriers & destinations
- Digressive pricing (Quantity discounts)
- Real-time currency exchange rates
- Inventory management
- SMS/Text-message alerts
- Add/delete function modules
- 13 default language translations
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Friendly URLs / Permalinks
- 100% modifiable graphic themes
- Back Office users & permissions (ACL )
- Minimum order amount
- Newsletter contact export
- Alias search
- Bulk lister/import .CSV files
- SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption
The basic requirements includes to install are Apache web server 1.3 or later OR IIS 6 or later, PHP 5.0 or later, MYSQL 5.0 or later, Linux, Unix or Windows OS. You can easily download, install and use the package. Install it by simply following the Prestashop’s automatic installer.
PrestaShop is known for its flexible and simple code. Modules can be designed and modified easily. The database schema for prestashop by mysql workbench is available in this link database schema.
Image Courtesy: daveegerton.com
Prestashop structure is scalable and modular so that developers can easily adapt to their client’s requirements.On the web, appearances matter and the PrestaShop e-Commerce Solution was built to take advantage of essential Web 2.0 innovations such as dynamic AJAX-powered features and next-generation ergonomy. PrestaShop guides users through your product catalog intelligently and effortlessly, turning intrigued visitors into paying customers. It is the SMARTY enabled templates that make the task easier.SMARTY with its template system which processes the back-end content and makes the output available for the front-end to be displayed.There are many Smarty Global Variables in Prestashop a few are here, $img_dir { images folder in your current theme directory },$css_dir { css folder inside the current theme folder },$js_dir { JavaScript inside the theme folder }.
For modules and themes one can check this link http://addons.prestashop.com/en/ .There is one more thing prestabox ,With prestabox, E-seller don’t have to care about hosting or keeping up to date the version of PrestaShop. E-seller can buy a domain name with the Prestashop registration. And the customers would then reach the eshop through that domain name.
The official support is not provided but many answered questions are available on the official forum.Furthermore Prestashop has a big growing community there to help.
