Businesses that sell products online have to have a good shopping cart system. Without one, there’s no easy way for customers to find products, add them to the list of things they want to buy, and then check out in a secure and easy manner. Shopping carts make all of that possible. While some businesses will have a web developer create a shopping cart system for them, it’s somewhat like reinventing the wheel—why put that extra work into it? There are many free, open source shopping cart systems available for businesses to use. One of the most well-known and popular ones is called PrestaShop.
There are a number of reasons why people turn to PrestaShop as their eCommerce solution. First of all, the platform is completely free. Users can make use of all of the features of PrestaShop without paying any upfront cost or any monthly fee. There are no restrictions on the software, either. Second of all, PrestaShop is open source. This means that the code that runs the shopping cart system is available for programmers to view and edit. Those who know what they’re doing can modify PrestaShop, making a unique version of it for their business. There are also online communities where programmers share their modifications to PrestaShop for others to use.
PrestaShop comes with a number of different tools that let users handle SEO, control the shopping cart’s functionality, and more. All in all, the software has over 300 different features in the basic, unmodified version. All of these included features are available as soon as PrestaShop is installed. However, for those who need something a little different and don’t want to delve into coding, the PrestaShop Addons Store has a large number of other modules and different templates that can be downloaded for free. Installation is fairly easy, too.
PrestaShop allows business users to accept 12 different types of payments, including credit cards, though third-party processing sites such as PayPal, Authorize.net, and Hipay.
There are a number of different help documents and websites created by PrestaShop veterans that will help new users install and set up their own shopping carts. There are even websites that outline how to start modifying PrestaShop’s code. However, for those who need help from a live person, a number of partner agencies have joined with PrestaShop to offer training. These partners are all certified by PrestaShop. However, these partners do charge a fee for their services.
