PrestaShop VS WooCommerce

Technology

PrestaShop was created in order to offer a feature-rich, efficient online sales platform. Launched on the market in 2007, the e-commerce solution has today become one of the most popular, with over 270,000 active stores around the world. WooCommerce is a plug-in for WordPress (blog platform whose initial goal is not online sales) developed in 2011, which offers the possibility to transform a website into an e-commerce.

Design

With the two options, you can use themes or create a custom design. There are a number of templates covering practically all sectors. With any PrestaShop theme, your online store will look like what it truly is: an e-commerce. It will display characteristic and recognizable elements of an online sales site, always located in adequate zones. The user is in unknown territory: an online store. On the contrary, in WordPress, a number of themes compatible with WooCommerce don’t have the appearance of an online sales site, which can be confusing. You don’t know if you are browsing a company website, a virtual store, a catalogue, an affiliate platform...

Characteristics and configuration

PrestaShop is e-commerce software created specifically to sell online. It brings together everything necessary to configure online stores: product attributes, sale rules, advanced stock management, virtual product management, a product comparer, pre-visualization mode, invoicing, massive data import and export, statistics, multilingual support, tax rules, single- or multi-step purchasing processes, employee management, etc. Many of these features aren’t available with WooCommerce and you’ll need to use specific plug-ins to manage pricing, multi-language or multi-store support, catalogue mode, product comparison, data importation, and others. In these cases, some modules can lead to incompatibility and conflict with other existing plug-ins.

An evolving solution

PrestaShop is an ever-changing tool. Its 600 features are not meant to be used when creating your store. The more your activity grows, the more you will use its features. PrestaShop can manage very large catalogues (over 100,000 products) and can handle a high number of orders. WooCommerce is not adapted for large catalogues. As such, if your activity grows, you will quickly run into problems related to stock management, order processing, customer service, etc.