According to all the latest figures, e-commerce on the web is booming, at a time when high street retail is struggling. And is it any wonder; you can find just about any product you can think of, at the click of a mouse, and have it delivered to your doorstep. Perfect for the armchair shopper. But building an e-commerce or webstore is difficult and expensive, isn’t it? Well no, it doesn’t have to be either. You can build a webstore for free with open source software. But won’t that be difficult and need technical support. No, not with prestashop.
Prestashop is professional, open source, e-commerce shopping cart software. It’s designed by a french team of programmers and developers and is now used in 33,000 webstores throughout the world. It has a 50,000 member community, so help and support is never far away. As it’s open source, it’s free, the code is small and light (6MB). And it’s fast with a slick, intuitive interface. Oh, and it looks good too, for that all important credibility factor.
You can demo the software with a simple store demonstration, which even straight out of the box looks quite impressive, and check out the long list of features with the back office demo, which you use to configure your storefront and add products. And what a list of features; integration with google checkout, paypal and clickbank, newletter opt-ins, wishlist, affiliate program, customer created product reviews, flexible shipping and billing, SSL(secure pages for purchasing), reporting, different languages and SEO optimisation. You can even adjust the look and feel. All of this for free. This is what’s great about open source software.
You can also see what others have done with this software, which I find is always good for sparking ideas and inspiration. Bubbles and soap is a UK-based store. Vellatech sells laptops and IDM is a food dispenser webstore. All created with prestashop. These are good examples of what can be achieved. Best of all for non-techies, prestashop is quick and easy to download and configure.
Your webstore opening is waiting for you.
