Why would you want to have a prestashop shopping cart website?

A shopping cart is a great way to list a range of products in categories that your customers will want to browse at a leisurely pace. If your potential customers will want to look at lots of photos and read descriptions of your products, check out feature lists and do some virtual window shopping then that is when an online prestashop shopping cart is a very good choice for presenting your wares for sale.

If you need an easy to manage shopping cart that can handle tens or thousands of products, with a raft of sales options, detailed statistical analysis and built in order management then prestashop may be the best option for you.

How will you know if a shopping cart is the best option for your business?

It is best that we discuss how your business works, what sort of products you have, how your customers decide what to purchase and what are the conditions of sale before we make a recommendation about how best to give your business and ecommerce system. There are important considerations like how will you charge for shipping, or will you make freight free, will you offer lots of size, colour and feature variations for customers to select or just offer the most popular variation of a product range? If we know the answers to these questions we will be able to help you make an informed decision about the best type of ecommerce website you could have.

Is prestashop a great choice for your business and products to sell online?

Prestashop is a shopping cart software built on the most popular web technologies of php, mysql and ajax. It can be easily connected to paypal for credit card payments. A shopping cart website is best suited to businesses that would be able to operate in a similar way to a small retail shop, especially boutique or niche product ranges. The following examples of our clients online stores are successful and well suited to prestashop:

What types of businesses are not well suited to a prestashop shopping cart?

It would be easy for us to offer a shopping cart to everyone that wants to sell products online but it is not always in their best interests if we do that. There are some businesses and product ranges that need a customised solution for online sales or perhaps just an enquiry form. We wouldn’t recommend a shopping cart if you are trying to setup a ‘supermarket’ of everything, nor is a shopping cart very well suited to businesses that have a large number of products with low margins or products that have a highly customised sales process where lots of customer interaction is required.

Can prestashop be used for wholesale businesses?

Yes. However, there are alternative solutions which we would be more likely to recommend. Prestashop does allow you to have customer groups that receive designated discounts or free shipping and you can create coupon codes that can be given out for a similar purpose such as a WIP club. There are key differences for wholesale ordering that you should consider though and that is that your buyers probably well informed about the products, they are in a hurry, they are used to using a printable order sheet and they want multiple quantities of a number of products. That sort of ordering pattern can be cumbersome if the buyer has to navigate around categories and sections of a website rather than having a single order page. Fruit and vege home delivery sales are a great example of where this type of system work well. It is a product sale which is better done as a customised order form which is a familiar format for a wholesale customer where the products are well known and you don’t need lots of pictures and descriptions.