PrestaShop is an open source e-commerce solution that is used freely by more than 120,000 online stores worldwide. It comes with over 275 features being carefully developed in order to increase business owners’ sales with minimal efforts required. All the software features are absolutely free.

PrestaShop is free software as it’s specified in the GNU General Public License and officially started in August 2007 for small and medium-size businesses. The software, based on the Smartly template engine, nowadays is used by more than 100,000 shops all over the world.

PrestaShop has a good record and even was awarded the title of the Best Open Source E-Commerce Application in the Packt 2010 Open Source Awards and the Best Open Source Business Application in the 2011 Open Source Awards.

It supports various payment systems such as PayPal, Google Checkout, Payments Pro via API, Authorize.net and Skrill. It is used on Apache web server 1.3 or later, with PHP 5 or later and MySQL 5 running on it.

About 41 languages are available to different degrees, but only English and French have full support in all the versions. In the admin panel AJAX is used extensively in the software. Module blocks can be added easily to the online store to supply with extra functionality.

Think of managing a dynamic product list at the PrestaShop back-office: administrative interface helps you manage with one-click most complex inventory updates. PrestaShop has a one-page checkout, provides customers with a great number of options to view the chosen products, reliable shipping options along with control logistics ( fees, shipping restrictions, weight and many more) and the ability to attach custom messages. So you can see that PrestaShop will do its best to simplify and make more comfortable customers’ work. When speaking about defying taxes according to customer’s localization, PrestaShop has an advanced tracking system as well as customizable exchange rates. The customers can also choose the preferred currency.

One more important feature is the system’s analytics and reporting responsibilities:

• Track visitors – allows you learn who your customers are and where they come from. And also makes it possible to view great statistics provided by PrestaShop.
• View customer Profiles.
• Track orders and sales – allows find out what days you get most sales, keep track of your success.
• Catalogue statistics – allows view statistics on how the content is performing, check out your best sellers and top catalogues.
• Affiliate Statistics – allows learn who is sending most traffic and react to that.

There is also a great number of different promotional and marketing tools built in, for example such as automated follow-up e-mails, newsletters subscription, loyalty program which offers rewards to your customers, refer-a-friend program provides your customers’ get a special discount if they subscribe their friends. Due to this option you can remind your customers what they viewed lately or show mostly viewed products. Think of improving your sales with vouchers and coupons.

PrestaShop is a simple, useful and light e-commerce solution with its obvious advantages. Concluding this article our team would like to add that all the great things are simple.

CartTuning is ready to provide you with the great prestashop modules and prestashop templates developed specially for your business.