Book Image

PrestaShop 1.3 Beginner's Guide

Book Image

PrestaShop 1.3 Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

PrestaShop is a hidden gem. There are many much more widely known online shopping cart solutions that have nothing like the features, potential, and ease of use that this open source, completely free-to-use, system has. But until now there has been no information available on how to make the most of it. This book takes a step-by-step approach to help you set up your own e-commerce store and maximize its potential. Even if you are totally new to e-commerce and PrestaShop, you can have your own functioning e-commerce store quickly and with tiny expenditure. Imagine the feeling when you get that glorious e-mail saying that you have your first paying customer.This practical guide follows the order of developing an active business. Packed with easy-to-follow steps with loads of screenshots and clear explanations, it follows a step-by-step approach to set up a PrestaShop e-commerce store from the very beginning through finding a web host, setting up your PrestaShop store, accepting money from customers, and planning for the future of your business.The first few chapters are a lightening, but thorough, illustration of how to get your shop online, stocked up, and looking smart and unique, including some really cool and really simple product features to show off your wares in style – very quickly. The later chapters are quite diverse and cover some exciting stuff such as newsletters, loyalty schemes, alternative revenue streams, statistics and analytics. You will also learn about security, disaster recovery, payment handling, currencies, taxes, shipping, and more. Towards the end, the chapters cover final preparations before going live, handling orders in PrestaShop, and how to promote your store and get more customers. Once the money starts to flow, the book looks at the future of e-commerce and your PrestaShop business. Then it discusses how to get to the top of your niche and stay there. And then the big secret: to use the knowledge you have gained to turn a single PrestaShop into a thriving e-commerce empire.The Appendix covers a number of worthwhile topics such as a handy PrestaShop control panel reference and various web resources for PrestaShop.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
PrestaShop 1.3 Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface

About the Reviewers

Tomer Grassiany, born in Israel, has been interested in computer science since an early age. His serious work in computers and computer networks began during his high school years in Israel. Prior to coming to the U.S. at the age of 19, he administered networks at two Israeli computer animation schools.

As Chief Technology Officer and later Chief Software Architect of Meaningful Machines, a New York-based company, Tomer was in charge of research and development, including bringing the inventors' ideas to life. His focus was on the company's new and sometimes experimental applications. From 1999 to 2007, Tomer developed applications that brought the company's new technologies from concept to reality in the fields of Machine Translation, Data Mining, and Artificial Intelligence. During this time, he worked closely on machine translation with Professor Jaime Carbonell, the Allen Newell Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Tomer went on to found COMET Classifieds in 2007. The leading classifieds website in COMET's portfolio is TennisLessons.com, which has coaches listed in over 400 cities across 40 countries. Helping to connect over 30,000 students and coaches every month, it has become the most popular website for finding tennis lessons.

Tomer has been working since the start of 2009 doing custom PrestaShop projects for new and existing shops worldwide. He is also a PrestaShop Moderator on the English and Hebrew forums.

Tomer's newest venture is Presto-Changeo.com. Created in 2009, the website offers his PrestaShop modules and provides tips on how to troubleshoot and customize PrestaShop. His modules help shops to create a better experience for their customers, and increase productivity and sales.

Ardian Yuli Setyanto is a 22-year-old website developer from Indonesia and currently specializes in PrestaShop module and theme creation. He also moderates the PrestaShop local forum for Indonesian users.

Being a freelancer and a householder for a year has been a wonderful experience for him and he thanks his wife, Niela Pratamasari, for always supporting him.

You can get an update on PrestaShop tutorials and modifications on Ardian's blog (http://ardianys.com/) and follow him on Twitter (http://twitter.com/ardianys). His opinion about PrestaShop: "Although currently PrestaShop lacks in documentation, I have already found the great PrestaShop documentation in its source code."