The concept of selling online is simple: you list your products and their prices, a customer will browse, pay for the products, and finally, you have a completed transaction. So this all sounds easy enough but how do you even go about creating an online showroom in which a customer can browse your wares? PrestaShop is one such tool that can help create a dynamic and professional looking storefront. At the basics, the e-commerce shopping cart platform serves as a management tool to help business owners catalog their products, process transactions, maintain customer accounts, and any other related administrative task. Managing the backend of your online store is simple as PrestaShop’s user interface is intuitive and self explanatory.
PrestaShop’s Back Office feature allows you, the business owner, to access your store from any web browser, making it extremely flexible. The Back Office menu contains different tabs ranging from: catalog, customers, orders, payment, to modules, and employees. starting with the catalog tab, this allows you to update product quantity, position, and description. The customer tab lets you store and retrieve customer information like name and email address. The orders tab contains all the current orders that are awaiting fulfilment. The payment tab allows you to select the types of currency and payments (check, credit cards, etc.) that your’re willing to accept, as well as the country or countries for which you want the payment modules to be available to. The module tab is one of the most useful as it allows you to add extra features to your site like google analytics or themes that change the way your store looks. Finally we have the employees tab where you can store and maintain employee profiles as well as give access to the site. These are just a handful of features among the many that PrestaShop contains.
Building and maintaining a storefront is made simple enough with PrestaShop but first you’re going to need a server or host to store your information and data files. Generally speaking, it’s a lot better to have a fast server which entails a faster loading site and consequently, a much better search engine page ranking.
