8 Reasons To Use Prestashop For Your Ecommerce Store

Are you not using Prestashop for your e-commerce store? Here’s why you should.

By Mark Hesketh, posted 2nd March, 2012

Prestashop is a free, secure and open source e-commerce platform, packed with over 275+ features that will run on just about any web server.

If this isn’t enough to convince you to give it a shot, we’re going to run through 10 reasons to use Prestashop for your e-commerce store.

If you have never heard of Prestashop, you should visit our What is Prestashop? post for a quick run through of what you’re missing out on.

These reasons are by no means the only reasons to use Prestashop. Merchants needs will vary from store to store but I have yet to come across an e-commerce store that could not be run on Prestashop.

1. It’s Open source

Being open source means Prestashop means you can use, change and distribute in whichever way you see fit. If you’re an agency or designer looking for an e-commerce platform then Prestashop could be for you.

You could potentially, and quite easily, use Prestashop as a white label e-commerce platform for your client projects.

If however you’re a merchant, being open source means that there is a huge community of developers ready to help and aid you with your needs, as they actively work with the software and you don’t have to rely on the Prestashop team directly to aid you in your problems (often at a very large fee!).

2. Prestashop Themes and Modules

Prestashop Themes and Modules allow you to completely change the look and feel of your store, often for free. You should see our Free Prestashop Themes and Templates post if you’d like to see whats out there.

If you’re willing to put in the time yourself to create something bespoke for your store, this is also very easy to do. Take a look at our Prestashop Theme inspiration gallery, or Matthew Morek’s Prestashop Module Boilerplate to get started creating Prestashop Themes and Modules right away.

3. Prestashop Overrides

Prestashop overrides allow developers to overwrite Prestashop’s core functionality, safe in the knowledge that their changes are not overwritten when Prestashop updates.

You can override Prestashop modules as well as Prestashop’s controllers and classes.

If you’re familiar with WordPress’ filter system this is quite similar.

As a merchant this might sound like nonsense to you, but it means that if a feature is not on your store, a developer can effectively create any feature you wish.

4. Prestashop 1.5

Though the current version, Prestashop 1.4 has been a big success including guest checkout, one page checkout and many more features, but Prestashop 1.5 is just around the corner.

Prestashop 1.5 will bring multi-stores, a better back office interface, processing orders through the admin interface and much more. We wrote about Prestashop 1.5′s upcoming features recently. Now looks like an exciting time to get onboard with using Prestashop.

5. Localisation

Whether your store is in the UK, USA, Germany or the middle east, Prestashop supports your currency and language.

Translations by the Prestashop community and are available from the official website.

Prestashop supports multiple languages and currencies on one store, so your customers can then select their native currency. You need not have multiple stores for different regions, as Prestashop enables you to sell globally with ease.

6. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Ranking well with Google can make or break your store. Luckily, Prestashop is very search engine friendly.

Prestashop features ‘pretty’ URL’s for all of your pages and products, allows custom meta information such as titles and keywords for each product, category and page, auto-generates Google XML Sitemaps, canonical URLsand much more.

Your e-commerce store is optimised correctly for Google.

7. Payment Providers

Prestashop comes with a number of payment providers ‘out of the box’ such as PayPal and Google Checkout. If you’re looking for something a bit more specific, such as SagePay or Barclaycard EDPQ, then a number of payment modules available on the Prestashop Addons website covering just about every payment provider.

8. Security

Prestashop is fully PCI Compliant and fully supports Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. Sensitive information such as passwords and cookies become encrypted and the Prestashop software encourages secure use, such as renaming your admin area’s URL to something more private, at every step of the way.

You can rest assured that Prestashop has put all the best security practices for e-commerce stores into practice on your behalf.

That’s it for now

Is there a particular reason that you use Prestashop for your store, or a reason that you’ve decided against it and instead opted for another e-commerce platform instead? Let us know in the comments below.