A brilliant idea, the choicest of products that are fast moving… happy customers… exciting reviews… this is the dream of every new online shop owner. With a number of open source eCommerce software available online for download and installation, how to choose the right solution? Of course, there are numerous reviews and suggestions available online. This blog post is an attempt to help you choose between Magento and PrestaShop, the solution that is designed to help you register profits from day one!
To make our comparison and analysis simple, I pick up two open source eCommerce Solutions that are popular, and of course, each has its own advantages and limitations.
Features listing of Magento and PrestaShop
PrestaShop
- Available for full download as Open Source Installer kit
- Remarkable speed
- Smarty Template engine to easily create new templates
- Simple and easy to upgrade
- Numerous add-ons and templates are available as free.
- Trusted developers to design custom modules and templates.
- Easy to use back office modules
- Creating templates and modules requires a small learning curve, if needed.
Magento
- Open source and two (expensive) commercial additions
- Bit Slow unless hosted on a dedicated server
- Creating templates is very well structured but making it more complicated than PrestaShop
- Upgrading can be a bit complex and frustrating especially when going up a few versions
- Back office appears to be simple and well displayed.
- Creating templates and modules requires a bigger learning curve than with PrestaShop. The services of a Magento developer may be needed, at times for customization.
- Unnecessary complexity for the non-technical shop owner.
One feature that gives PrestaShop an edge over Magento is its customizable design. Instead of digging through code intertwined with templates, PrestaShop divides the PHP code from the templates making it easy to customize the design with CSS code and div tags. There are free themes available for PrestaShop and you can find good deals on premium themes online from trusted developers like eGrove Systems.
Read also: WordPress vs. Magento – Best eCommerce Solution For Your Website?
About PrestaShop
PrestaShop has grown to be one of the most reliable and flexible Open-source e-commerce software. PrestaShop comes with more than 275 features and is designed to be equipped with everything a new merchant needs to build and maintain an online shop.
If there is a rare occasion where you do not find a feature that you are looking for or need bit of tweaking or customization, simply call a trusted developer like eGrove Systems and they will enlist one of their agile developers to work on the feature for you. Their experts can also explain how to maximize the benefits of current features.
- As I write this post, there has been 1,565,744 downloads of PrestaShop ecommerce software and the Prestateam consists of over 100 passionate individuals committed to support fellow PrestaShop users and more than 300 000 community members dedicated to innovated technology.
- The current version of PrestaShop 1.4.8 is available for FREE download (about 15MB) and is a lot smaller than the current version of Magento 1.7.0.0 (about 26.67 MB for the zipped version).
- PrestaShop is claimed to be capable of handling about 25,000 products. It depends of your hosting company than shopping cart. I suggest you to use PrestaShop 1.4.6.2. It’s the latest version.
- The shopping cart is a charm because of its simplicity and very user-friendly interface.
About Magento
To the merchant who looks at a medium scale online store, Magento eCommerce Platforms provides the scalability, flexibility and features for business growth. It provides feature-rich eCommerce platforms that offer complete flexibility and control over the presentation, content, and functionality of their online store.
Increased Control over visual appeal and features
- Merchants are provided with features to Control every facet of their online store, from merchandising to promotions and more.
Increased customer flow and ROI
- It is obvious that Magento’s commercial open source business model yields a superior product at a low cost.
Increased Growth
- Magento’s feature-set and flexibility enable merchants to increase revenue by attracting more customers.
To summarize, as an online merchant, allowing the shopper to search for products is of prime importance and PrestaShop has the edge! PrestaShop Search feature is more impressive and fast as compared to Search of Magento. Faster searches make shopping more interesting and encourage regular customers to come back for more!
Ultimately, it is the needs and requirements that can help a merchant decide. Better features and functionality come at an extra cost and trusted developers like eGrove Systems can help merchants setup their online stores and make a difference!
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