Prestashop Review
9Prestashop, unlike Magento, is the new open source ecommerce solution that any seasoned developer can pick up and modify to their needs. It’s still very new and there aren’t very many payment or shipping modules yet. I’ve had the opportunity to work with Prestashop for my employer this past week and will share my experience. I chose Prestashop over Magento, oscommerce, zencart, and xcart based on the customizations we needed.
Pros:
1. Good use of object oriented PHP
2. Smarty templates for the view layer
3. Easy to customize code
4. Tableless design that uses a lot of CSS
5. “Block” content that can be edited via the admin by point and click.
Cons:
1. Poor design of attribute combinations
2. Little to no comments within the code
Download or try the online demo at http://www.prestashop.com .
Hi I'm Nick Bartlett and thanks for visiting my blog. I'm not much of a writer; many of my posts are short and to the point while others are meant to be a reference for myself and other web developers.
I’ve been using Prestashop 1.0 for a year now and the only reason I haven’t switched to Magento is because I put way too much work into this shop already. Prestashop has some good features but it is way off, in my opinion, for any serious shop use.
4 months in, you still impressed?
Good question Dave. I’d have to say no. Prestashop is still pretty new and it lacks many features that other mature ecommerce solutions offer like grouped products, volume/quantity discounts, different input types for attributes, cross sell products, etc. I’ve been looking into OXID Eshop recently and it looks pretty good. It has all the benefits of prestashop but with most of the features you’d expect.
Having used Zen Cart for a couple of years and having the nightmare of updating, patching, plugging and generally beating it about, Prestashop is a welcome breath of fresh air. The user interface both front and back is so much better than Zen Cart. Sure, more payment module options would be nice but the discount structure is more than adequate. Modifications are easy, CSS is aslo easy to modify and the whole experience is very good. Sales have increased over Zen Cart (Both using Paypal Website Payments Standard) because the user registration process is much cleaner and easier to follow for the visitor. I could go on, but anyone who thinks you can’t run a great shop from Prestashop is just too close to the subject and entirely missing the point that above all a simple user experience = sales and that is surely what a shop is for !
If you compare attributes editing with Zen Cart, it’s a world apart with a complete set of attributes easily created in 2 screens – Zen Cart was a nightmare skipping backwards and forwards between pages for each attribute.
Quantity discounts are now there as is cross-selling and discount vouchering.
I can’t really comment on code commenting as I’m happier leaving the background code unaltered to facilitate easy updates. There’s enough flexibility in the CSS to modify as much as I need and there’s enough flexibility in the backend to re-arrange where modules appear.
I’ve now moved several shops across from Zen Cart to Prestashop, particularly as Zen Cart seems to have lost it’s way with no apparent updates on the ‘real’ horizon. Still impressed ? – Very much so !
Prestashop has been growing and improving extremely fast, both in number of users / forum members, and in development / features added.
Many of the Prestashop features and addons you mentioned are available now.
I am an English Moderator on the Prestashop forum, and I see many people that are far less tech savvy than me that manage to install and customize their own shops, and install themes, modules and modification with little or no help.
I have many useful modules for Prestashop on my store (http://www.presto-changeo.com/), like a filter module, a translation module (which I used to translate my site to 15 other languages), and an attribute wizard module that lets you customized your attributes similar to apple’s website.
The named site is of own design. Anyone visting this site will note that I have multiple choice variation After a huge waste of valuable time believing reviews such as this, I changed to prestashop. To find that at best I can get is a 500 variation of mix and match in each style. Now that may seem rediculas when one only has a top size – choice of 16, bottom size choice of 8, and then the colour choice of 13. Simple architecture that cannot be done with presta shop. At best it is a three choice reseller programme for those who are not into real Internet retailing.
Well then your lucky. After months of trying to modify basic design, I now went to forum for answers. Couldn’t login. Change password, same thing. Changed browsers, created new account, ERROR. It typifies Prestashop. Good luck
Please, if you are considering Prestashop, DON’T. I’ve spent 4 months beating this dead horse, and enough is enough. The last straw was trying to login to the forums and given an error. After resetting the PW , error again. Use a different browser, error again. Create a new account,
another error. This just typifies Prestashop. If you want a cart application that you don’t want to modify, maybe it’s for you. Otherwise run away from it as fast as you can
Dave
Hi David.
Your poiny of view is interesting, but what alternative better framework you know?