• Prestashop is robust, professional grade e-Commerce shopping cart that you can download, install, and use for free. In the back end, you will use a full featured back end to manage your inventory, orders, shipping, and customers in real time. Your customer’s payments are sent directly to your commercial bank account using the latest security technology. You can even add your own modules to the shopping cart.

What is mean by Prestashop

Check out Some themes of Prestashop

Advantages of Prestashop Ecommerce System

• 1. Free and open source : If your budget is tight it will save your money which can be used for advertising (Google AdWords, banners…)

• 2. Size of software : 2.2 MB (1292 files)• 3. SEO friendly : This is the first thing you should check. It is critical

for your web store to be SEO friendly. It is easy to change URLs, Title tags in Prestashop so your SEO experts will be happy with this platform.

• 4. Animated add to cart : Prestashop has in-built animated add to cart feature.

• 5. Multilingual : In most cases you’ll need to translate your web store in one or few languages. Prestashop supports all major languages.

• 6. Prestashop is easy to develop : It’s important to know that there will be developers who can help you for a reasonable price and within reasonable period of time. For e.g. Magento developers are quite expensive because Magento is not easy to maintain (develop) – it’s quite complicated system.

• 7. Fast and it does not require expensive servers to run : We tried Magento but it required too much server resources and configuration so we went back to Prestashop.

• 8. Many free modules : You can start your shop in minutes if you are in a rush and of course you save money.

• 9. It has modules and themes shop : You can buy required module or theme and improve your shop in minutes. Take a look here. Prestashop validates those modules and ensures quality – so you are not taking any risks. Besides unique solutions costs much more. Developers can sell modules multiple times so they charge less and they are wiling to fix their bugs because they get money for their products.

• 10. It’s easy to learn : You do not have to be an e-commerce expert to master Prestashop.

• 11. It has big community : Check Prestashop forum. You’ll find answers to most of your questions.

• 12. It is rapidly improving : Sometimes it’s annoying because you have to update your Prestashop constantly. But every new release gets better and better. E-commerce is changing rapidly so does and Prestashop

Disadvantages

Large number of bug fixes• The script programmers release bug fixes and new options about twice a month.

An update is requires especially when it comes to security issues. Unfortunately applying those fixes takes a considerable know-how. Releasing bug fixes makes it known to everybody what kind of vulnerabilites there are in older versions, so someone could use it on an older scripts. On the other hand frequent fix releases are a pain for the shop owners. This vicious circle could only be broken by automatic updates, which, as of yet, are not available in PrestaShop.

Paid functionalities• Built-in functionalities in other free scripts can often turn out to be payable in

PrestaShop. That's why it's worth considering if the paid functionality you're after is really that necessary. If so, maybe another script could offer it for free?

Scalability• Though the application aspires as a large shop base, it does not do as well as

Magento. The script architecture can at some point hinder or even completely prevent a programmer from further developing the cart.

Conclusions

• PrestaShop is good for start. The script works as well with medium and large number of products. If there are few products and a lot of traffic, other scripts like Probytes.net would work better. PrestaShop's efficiency when there's a 100 products isn't any better than when there are 1000.As we all know, the appetite grows with what it feeds on, but what PrestaShop lacks in built-in functionalities, can be made up with free or paid plugins. It's rare that an online shop owner is hang out to dry, since the PrestaShop programmers' community is ever growing.