Prestashop, because of its free and open-source format is a favourite amongst merchants of all kinds. Another reason for the platform’s popularity is the huge availability of skilled Prestashop developers in India and across the world.
It is worthwhile to know that the platform currently powers 250,000 online stores from all over the world. If you happen to be one of the many merchants who have chosen to use this platform for expanding your business, then you must know about the steps required for setting up your Prestashop store. Thus, let us delve deeper and know about these steps in some detail:
1) Choose A Suitable Infrastructure: Depending upon your budget and needs, you must choose a suitable hosting infrastructure for your e-commerce website. There are mainly two options for a hosting infrastructure- shared and dedicated. A dedicated hosting implies the use of a dedicated server for a single website while a shared hosting implies the use of a shared server for 100s of websites. The former is an expensive option and is suitable for high-traffic e-commerce websites while the shared option is suitable for medium and low sized traffic e-commerce websites with a tight budget.
2) Download Prestashop : After choosing a suitable hosting service, download the freely available source code of Prestashop. It is advisable that you download Prestashop version 1.6 rather than the latest release of 1.7 as essential e-commerce modules that are compatible with the latest version are not available as of now.
3) Deploy A Suitable Theme: Depending on your target audience, deploy a suitable theme for your Prestashop store. The official marketplace of Prestashop offers themes under the categories of art, sports, fashion, electronics, kids and many more relevant categories. Themes are further available in different styles such as minimalist, 3D, baroque, clean, and original.
Moreover, you can have a custom theme built for your online store by skilled designers.
4) Deploy Suitable Modules: The Prestashop marketplace offers modules of relevant categories such as marketing, SEO, shipping, payments & gateways, merchandising and etc. Many of them are free and many of them are paid. Moreover, you can choose to employ Prestashop custom development services and have custom modules built for your website.
5) Testing And Launch: After you are done with the design and development stages of building your Prestashop store, you must test your store for cross-browser compatibility and responsiveness. After testing your store, you can launch it live by activating your store from the back-office.
After launching your e-commerce website, you can also consider expanding your reach through your store’s mobile application. Fortunately, with the easy availability of development services, you can soon have an app store live and running, and thereby increase the reach of your business.
Summary: Prestashop, with its free source code and flexibility, has proven to be an effective e-commerce platform. The platform’s potential can be tapped by knowing the steps involved in building a store upon it. With the execution of significant steps, you can launch your store with success.
Angela
