I'm considering Prestashop for a new project. It seems to be younger than Zen-Cart and osCommerce. Since I just found it by Google, I'd like to gather comments and experience and comparison of Prestashop to established "brands" like Zen-Cart and osCommerce
+3
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As one that love working with Magento i just wanted to show you this article.
If i were in the works of setting up an site for online commerce, i wouldn't choose ZenCart or OSC. They are both old and doesnt update at all. But thats just an personal opinion. And i work a lot with these things.
My Prestashop knowledge is limited though, but if its anything like Magento i would recommend it. Cuz Magento is by far the leading commerce platform atm. Also just my 2 cents.
Arto Uusikangas
2010-01-11 07:50:13
Thanks. As far as I know, Magento is resource hungry and needs a dedicated web space, which my client is not looking for. Btw, do you think that $100/month for hosting is OK if you run a e-commerce site?
Viet
2010-01-11 07:54:18
+1 Could you please elaborate more on limitations of Prestashop?
Viet
2010-01-11 07:56:00
I don't know what your client wants to achieve. But if you are going to run an successful e-commerce site i think you are going to need an dedicated server for that anyways. As a E-commerce solution often gets "bloated" or big. And if you feel that magento is too resource hungry, then take a look at prestashop, as its a lite version of magento it seems.. at a glance. As far as pricing hosting im not the right person to ask, but 100$ feels steep. But whats included in that case?
Arto Uusikangas
2010-01-11 07:59:23
The main concern is good performance for reasonable price. Dedicated server might not fit their IT budget.
Viet
2010-01-11 08:11:36
+2
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We install and review all open source eCommerce solutions as a matter of course. So we have looked in depth at all the one mentioned here. I prefer osCommerce to Prestashop. Prestashop is too immature and simply does not have the in-built functionality or breadth of Add Ons. It is not a "lite" version of Magento by any means.
As to the other poster's comment about osCommerce and Magento. Magento is an out of the box solution which is very difficult to customize. You need to be a programmer to work with it and even then the learning curve is steep. And if you do customize, you then are buying out of their upgrade path. Which is why the average site does not customize and why so many Magento stores look so much alike.
Unlike Magento, osCommerce has and always will be intended as a core eCommerce solution on which you build you own unique eCommerce solution.
Two different approaches to building an eCommerce site. One is cookie cutter then other is fast track to custom solution.
ozworks
2010-01-12 01:53:40
+1 thanks. If I'd like to use Pretashop, is it mature enough? I see it has plenty of features and add-ons for Paypal and Authorize.net.
Viet
2010-01-12 02:28:29
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osCommerce & Zen Cart have been on the market for a while. Both of them have large communities and it pretty easy to find modules and plugins for these shopping carts. Presta Shop in its turn is relatively new but very promising. Though i heard many people say it lacks some functionality.
If you need to move your data from one shopping cart to different one you can try shopping-cart-migration.com to have the data transferred accurately.
Lesya
2010-04-06 16:08:43
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PrestaShop is an impressive new entry to the field, with a very attractive user interface and impressive product option/variant capabilities (like Zen Cart attributes). One downside is that it's much harder to modify; there is nothing like the Zen Cart "templating " capability so you're always changing core files. This gets hard to manage with the frequent release schedule PrestaShop is using. But you should definitely install it and spend some time testing it and evaluating its suitability for your shop.
Scott Wilson
2010-04-18 16:07:01
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The prestashop as good as it looks has still very little or no documentation and or ridicilously complex written smarty templ. stuff, driving us "open source" fanatics, like cattle into bottleneck traps forced to buy our way out.
Don't forget it's a company! they are even hiring at the moment. and we will be caught.
and imho, "open source" by a company? reaping all the benefits of community development, organising predators and game refuge paths for a nice game hunting season.
mtht
2010-05-01 15:01:23
Open source by a company is nothing nor, nor something suspect. You might have heard of Red Hat or Ubuntu, for instance. Unlike closed source packages, at least if you're 'caught' you have the CHANCE and the legal standing to figure it out yourself.
Alex JL
2010-08-14 22:08:44
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I want to open a small webshop with only 4 products. Do not want to spend weeks to install & learn the cms.
Is Zen-Cart the best option?
Thank you
Fred
2010-06-09 13:13:58
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Fred, use WordPress with one of its shopping plugins. That is the best thing for you and you don't have to get into this bloated world of shopping cart frameworks.
tejas
2010-07-19 10:00:10
+1
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I have been testing Presta for a few weeks now. Without any doubt it's userfriednliness is great and fancy frontends. However, if you are in trouble, you are pretty much on your own as the community is too small and if there is any bigger community for Presta out there then it's non-English. Bit of pain to get quick fixes.
Razzo
2010-07-23 18:12:46
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I found prestashop more powerful but to customize it you must have knoeledge on CSS , smarty template and php. For me it is better than Zen and Os
Show
2010-07-25 13:30:46
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Having used oscommerce, zen cart and more recently prestashop I would say prestashop is probably one of the easier solutions for building a relatively simple, attractive looking site. My main site is zen cart but I'm considering changing to prestashop. Unless you are an experienced designer / developer then I'd stay clear of oscommerce and go for zen cart or presta. Zen Cart is in a way a simpler version of oscommerce. Prestashop just looks more tidy and less like an "out of the box" solution to the untrained eye than os and zen. Some of the free templates are pretty tidy, and with the odd change to a few images it's relatively easy to customize the feel. Function is another story. As stated before there's limited documentation and community with presta - which i'm sure will grow steadily over the next year or so, which might make a beginer go with another solution.
Mark
2010-07-28 21:57:36
+1
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Prestashop has been growing and improving extremely fast, both in number of users / forum members, and in development / features added.
A good resource to start with is the new book "[PrestaShop 1.3 Beginner's Guide]", it goes though all the important features in Prestashop and guide you towards getting your shop online and having your first sale in one week.
In addition to doing technical review for the book, I am also an English Moderator on the Prestashop forum, and I see people with no programming or website development background manage to install and customize their own shops, add themes, modules and modification with little or no help.
The [Prestashop forum] has been growing rapidly as well, it reached nearly 90,000 members, and is by far the best place to get help or questions answered, usually within a short period of time. Make sure you search the forum first, because many questions have already been answered…
I have many useful modules for Prestashop on my store ( http://www.presto-changeo.com/ ), payment modules (Authorize.net, Firstdata etc.), an osCommerce to Prestashop migration, a translation module (which I used to translate my site to 15 other languages), an attribute wizard module that lets you customized your attributes similar to apple’s website, Facebook like button and many more.
There are also many Prestashop tips and useful information on my site, worth checking out…
Tomer Grassiany
2010-08-05 01:39:47
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prestashop is much easier than zen cart, oscommerce and magento. the easiest thing to do is try to install them as they are all free.
nora smith
2010-09-19 11:19:45
+1
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I work daily with PrestaShop. I think that it's the perfect solution for an average project. If you need something extremely fancy (but also extremely difficult to configure/use) you should go for Magento. I'm a programmer and I've had difficulties setting it up like I wanted. The learning curve is too steep. Of course it brings other advantages, but the project has to be big enough to make up for the time lost in learning to use the the platform.
The thing I like the most about PrestaShop it's the ease of use (for both the developer and the shop admin). Its modular system completely demolishes osCommerce. Everytime I have to work on an osCommerce shop, I cringe. It's outdated and it's not a good option, by any means. If you need to change the layout of the store, you just drag modules around in the Back Office. There's no cutting and pasting code in PHP files. The same for installing new modules.
In my opinion, PrestaShop is mature enough at this point. There are hundreds of modules you can use to customize it to your liking (just do a google search or try their forum). The template system is also top-notch and easy to use. Take a look at what you can do: http://www.templatemonster.com/prestashop-themes.php
I also messed around with VirtueMart. It's not a bad solution if you want to integrate your shop with a CMS (Joomla). There's also TomatoCart, a new-comer (they still don't have documentation for developers) that's based on osCommerce 3 alpha, but from what I've seen it's a major improvement. The Back Office is amazing.
Summing it up, I think PrestaShop is excellent if you need something that's easy to use, easy to configure and flexible. Magento is better for LARGE projects because there's a lot of overhead. If you are planning on configuring more stores in the future, the time lost learning Magento might be acceptable.
Mike42
2010-09-19 11:37:57
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The best feature of Zen Cart and osCommerce is possibility to manage online store on your local computer and than upload all changes on the server. Everyone oscommerce/zencart user can realize it with proper Store Manager by MagneticOne. So if you running your store with osCommerce - Store Manager for osCommerce (google it) is right for you! Otherwise, Zen Cart users can try Store Manager for Zen Cart.
All this software have trial version and can be downloaded for free!