Niche stores are no longer the thing of small towns. The internet has given has given new life to the mom-and-pop retailers of all sorts of quirky trinkets and novelty products. Sure, online communities offering free e-commerce management do exist for sellers such as this (eCrater and etsy), but giving in to such an offering requires the seller to hang their brand on the back of another. Luckily, setting up a personally branded e-store is almost as easy as using a free service with the help of auto-installer software generally found on any good web-host.
Many aspiring online retailers intially turn to the ever popular osCommerce, ZenCart, or CubeCart platforms because they are free and open source allowing for maximum customizability and code-modification. These e-commerce solutions are decent, yet require a bit of coding and re-tooling to make anything unique and aesthetically pleasing. Without any modification, these platforms tend to look a bit Web 0.5, like you were shopping for cassette tapes back in 1995. On the other end of the open source scale is the e-commerce super-solution Magento. While Magento does offer arguably the best platform and most easily customizable store with many excellent pre-made skins and modules, Magento proves to be a rather cumbersome piece of software to run. 3 out of 4 installation attempts failed, before I finally was able to work all of the kinks out. If your web-host has an auto-install version of Magento available, you are already 10 steps ahead.
My search for the perfect open source e-commerce platform ultimately led me to PrestaShop. PrestaShop is the happy medium between the skeletal systems like osCommerce, and the menacing giant that is Magento. PrestaShop is a relatively new e-commerce solution, yet they offer a wide variety of versions and translations for over 20 different countries – making e-retailing a reality for people around the world. PrestaShop’s well documented instructions, wiki, and forum all assist the user in finding any and all solutions to their PrestaShop questions and queries. PrestaShop also comes with a decent amount of excellent looking and easily customizable free themes and modules. Accepting payments with PrestaShop is a snap with the support of PayPal, Google Checkout, Wire Transfers, or COD for you more old fashioned and risky types. For those who decide to get extra-crazy and sell internationally, PrestaShop also offers a currency conversion tool.
To learn more about PrestaShop’s excellent and user friendly feature set click over to PrestaShop.com. Thoughts and PrestaShop success stories are welcome for discussion here – just drop a comment.
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I have my fair share of using magento and prestashop. Installing and solving countless issues related to magento…Magento give me an impression of a complex software. Right from the start, you will need to meet some of their requirement eg. innodb mysql db. Not many hosts support that. Next, permission problem which caused alot of internal error. So, you will want to look for host who know how to fix these issues.. to cut thing short.. magento is a good product if you are able to sail through the setup part.. and remember to backup if you are going to install their plugin.
Prestashop really save the day. They are simple to setup and easier to configure. Their shop front is decent and serve well for an online shop.
If you do not want to deal with complex problems later on… prestashop is the way to go.
my 2 cent
Joseph
- http://www.mxhub.com
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