Switching to PrestaShop: Questions and Concerns

[Kaihaku]

After eight years my company has decided that its time to put our ancient and heavily modified e-commerce system to rest and I have been carefully examining possible successors. I have to admit that PrestaShop immediately caught my eye though I have taken the time to research the competition thoroughly to find the best fit for us.

Our current e-commerce system was originally commercial; it came with advanced features at the time but we ran into two major update issues.

1) It was not modular in design so in augmenting the system to meet our needs we ‘broke’ out of the box rendering the entire system incompatible with future patches.
2) Patches after the allotted licensing period became increasingly costly, as is common in commercial licenses.

Because of these upgrade issues, over the years we have become increasingly forced to rely on our programming skills to ‘keep up with the pack’. We would prefer to focus our programming efforts on innovative new features rather than on maintaining our place. This is why I have promoted Open Source solutions like PrestaShop over commercial alternatives such as Interspire and Magento to the owner.

After significant research we have three open source “finalists” for which we are installing trial shops to test more thoroughly; PrestaShop, OpenCart, and VirtueMart via Joomla. I will add more questions as I become more familiar with the three "finalists" in these trials.

Questions and Concerns
Module Licenses
Do PrestaStore Module Licenses cover future updates to the module and do they bridge PrestaShop versions? For example, would a license for the Venture.net Payment module bought for 1.2.5 cover 1.3.1? Or would a new license need to be purchased for each major upgrade of PrestaShop for each commercial Module?

'Common' Features
There are certain features found almost universally in competing e-commerce platforms that are only available as commercial modules in PrestaShop – are there guidelines for how PrestaShop-developed features are and will be categorized as free or commercial? My concern is that in the future choosing PrestaShop now might force us to miss out on, pay significantly for, or develop independently features commonly available at no expense on other platforms. We don’t mind paying for features but we want to have an idea of what sort of commitment in time and money PrestaShop might entail.

Smarty
There seems to be much debate on what the benefits of Smarty are; I could find no consensus. What are the Pros and Cons of a system using Smarty like PrestaShop Vs. a pure PHP system like OpenCart?

Speed
For what size of a shop is PrestaShop optimized? How many products, categories, and reviews should it ideally host? What factors most influence loading speed?

Customizable
How difficult is it for someone with reasonable PHP skills to create a module for PrestaShop? How does the process compare to modding for competitors? Along the same lines, how difficult is the skinning or theming process in comparison to competitors?

Closing
In closing, thanks for taking the time to read through this and I look forward to reading responses. I hope that they will quiet what doubts I have about PrestaShop's suitability for our needs.

Please, feel free to share any information that you feel is relevant to someone in our position.

Thank you.

[phantomeye]

HI ElderDepot,

This will not answer all your questions, but its a start:

1) For Prestastore module licenses, send them an email. I have not yet bought anything from them, but have bought a useful modules from the community and in most cases you can buy the option to cover all upgrades.

2) In my experience as a user, where i had no clue about any form of programming php, css, smarty, js or databases; its taken me a year and ive built 4 pretty decent sites using firebug and dreamweaver. The sites range from having 1000 - 4000 products. Im just embarking on my most adventurous site which will have 1100 categories and 15000 products.

3) The speed, ease of use, and ability to modifiy prestashop is amazing when compared with Magento, oscommerce & Zencart (have not tested on others). The default modules attached with prestashop are very powerful and useful.

4) For best results i found that running away from godaddy is a must (IMHO). Having a VPS or dedicated hosting solution is best when you want to get serious about selling to the masses.

5) I dont have an answer on smarty since i have no clue about programming languages, but im sure google may provide an educated answer.

6) Customizable, based on your opening paragraph, you guys should be able to have no problems creating & modifying modules and im sure pretty soon offering modules to community - when you do, remember - free is best and most appreciated ;-)

7) Lastly, i went through the same process a year ago and did almost 2 weeks of research. At the end of it, it was a choice between OScommerce, Magento & Prestashop. I chose prestashop because it was THE easiest to install and from that point forward, i have never had a problem.

Just as a quick pointer, my total expenditure in 1 year has been $80 when i bought the one page checkout module 2 weeks ago. Lovely module and absolutely worth it. The community here is very helpful and have answered all of my newbie questions. So just download and install prestashop already. :-)

[Kaihaku]

HI,

This will not answer all your questions, but its a start.

Hi, thanks for answering, this is helpful information.

1) For Prestastore module licenses, send them an email. I have not yet bought anything from them, but have bought a useful modules from the community and in most cases you can buy the option to cover all upgrades.

Good to know for community modules. Looks like I'll have to do some more looking into official modules.

2) In my experience as a user, where i had no clue about any form of programming php, css, smarty, js or databases; its taken me a year and ive built 4 pretty decent sites using firebug and dreamweaver. The sites range from having 1000 - 4000 products. Im just embarking on my most adventurous site which will have 1100 categories and 15000 products.

That's reassuring. If I may ask, how much traffic do your sites have and what sort of loading time are you getting? Though hosting plays into that as well.

Currently our load time is terrible and its important to upgrade to a system that offers better loading speed.

3) The speed, ease of use, and ability to modifiy prestashop is amazing when compared with Magento, oscommerce & Zencart (have not tested on others). The default modules attached with prestashop are very powerful and useful.

My research agrees that Magento, osCommerce, and ZenCart compare poorly to PrestaShop. I find it quite striking that Magento, given the price, compares so poorly.

From what I've seen; OpenCart, VirtueMart, UberCart, and Interspire compare far better against PrestaShop, though each still has downsides. I'm running trial runs of OpenCart, PrestaShop, and VirtueMart now. UberCart is out as Drupal is a bit too clunky for our tastes.

4) For best results i found that running away from godaddy is a must (IMHO). Having a VPS or dedicated hosting solution is best when you want to get serious about selling to the masses.

Never used GoDaddy, company has had dedicated hosting for years. But a good warning none the less.

5) I dont have an answer on smarty since i have no clue about programming languages, but im sure google may provide an educated answer.

Not this time unfortunately, it seems to offer only debate on this matter. I thought the easiest solution this time would be to get answers straight from the developers, I'm also asking OpenCart who shuns the use of Smarty the same question.

6) Customizable, based on your opening paragraph, you guys should be able to have no problems creating & modifying modules and im sure pretty soon offering modules to community - when you do, remember - free is best and most appreciated ;-)

Sounds good. As for offering modules to the community, ultimately that's up to my boss...though I think she might be up for it.

7) Lastly, i went through the same process a year ago and did almost 2 weeks of research. At the end of it, it was a choice between OScommerce, Magento & Prestashop. I chose prestashop because it was THE easiest to install and from that point forward, i have never had a problem.

Good to know.

Just as a quick pointer, my total expenditure in 1 year has been $80 when i bought the one page checkout module 2 weeks ago. Lovely module and absolutely worth it. The community here is very helpful and have answered all of my newbie questions. So just download and install prestashop already. :-)

Thanks for your help.

[phantomeye]

1) We get about 300 - 400 visits per day (however this number is skewed since it includes bot visits).
2) If you have a dedicated host, then your load times should be extremely fast.
3) On godaddy on a shared hosting account our load times were 7 - 8 seconds per page
4) On VPS our load times are 2 -3 seconds for 1st page and 1 second for every other page.

[Vaidas]

If you have many categories, prestashop is too slow. For me this is only one reazon, why i don't very like prestashop. other options is very useful, there are many modules and etc. in my server empty shop with no categories loads in 1 second, a full shop with about 1000 products with magento loads in 0,5 seconds. Try www.eu-electronics.lt . Prestashop should work on making it more faster than now.

[Kaihaku]

I have to thank both of you for your responses. So far the PrestaShop community has been the most responsive of the three "finalists"; it is much appreciated and a solid mark in PrestaShop's favor.

1) We get about 300 - 400 visits per day (however this number is skewed since it includes bot visits).
2) If you have a dedicated host, then your load times should be extremely fast.
3) On godaddy on a shared hosting account our load times were 7 - 8 seconds per page
4) On VPS our load times are 2 -3 seconds for 1st page and 1 second for every other page.

Thank you, that is very helpful. Adjusted for bot visits, our traffic averages about 400 to 500 visits a day, more on weekdays so the comparison is very relevant for us.

It sounds like PrestaShop should be able to give us a solid speed increase.

If you have many categories, prestashop is too slow.

Currently we have several hundred categories/subcategories but customers have complained that this is confusing so we are aiming to 'streamline' with this upgrade.

At around how many categories does PrestaShop begin to slow down drastically? How many is too many?

other options is very useful, there are many modules and etc.

Indeed.

in my server empty shop with no categories loads in 1 second, a full shop with about 1000 products with magento loads in 0,5 seconds. Try www.eu-electronics.lt

I've heard that Magento is difficult to customize, since we are interested in coding new features for our shop this makes it a bad fit for us. That is an impressive load time though, it seems to disprove rumors that Magento is bloated.

Nice shop.

Prestashop should work on making it more faster than now.

I read somewhere that this is a goal of the development team... Can anyone confirm that? It would be reassuring.

[Vaidas]

It's not my shop it's only example

[Kaihaku]

Well, it's still a nice shop.

Here's another question, is it currently possible to set up automatic reorders in PrestaShop? Many of our customers automatically reorder expendable items; they set an amount of time between reorders, get a email reminder a week before the reorder in case they want to cancel, and automatically receive a discount for automatic reordering.

I couldn't find a module with this functionality. If not, it's not a big deal, we coded this feature into our current system and I don't think it would be too difficult to write up a module for it in PrestaShop.

[Maksym]

Representative Cart2Cart team I can truly say that Prestashop is a second shopping cart (after Magento) which is prefered by our customers

[MrBaseball34]

Module Licenses

While the only commercial module I've purchased is one-page checkout, I can't vouch for the licensing issues with others. I would assume that if a vendor of a 3rd party module wanted to stay viable, they'd update the module to support later versions. If it cost more, you'd have to ask the particular vendor about their upgrade policy.

‘Common’ Features

Our requirements were not that stringent. We have 3 stores using PS, two on 1.2.5 and one on 1.3.1. I would say, now that I've worked with both, that there is not a big issue of getting around in them. But beware that there are many places where they switch "functionality" on you. Like some places they may use an object named $product and in others use an array named $product. It gets confusing some times to know if I should use a . operator or -> operator
;-)

I am most familiar with the 1.3.1 version since I am developing it from the ground up and adding loads of functionality.

Speaking of upgradability of your own modifications I'd like to say that
if you don't have to modify core files, don't. Upgradability is perhaps the biggest beef with PS the world over. I have clamored greatly that they should be using a utility like AutoMOD, which PHPBB uses. If you have never messed with it, it is a real charm upgrading and adding mods using AutoMOD. Even manual editing using it is easy because it tells you what to cut, what to replace, etc.

Smarty

I have known about Smarty for several years, and worked with it a little. I am not that in favor of using it because you, essentially,
have to learn another language. I'd rather they have made PS as a fully MVC based system where the Views are fully PHP. Makes it much easier to modify.

Speed

Yes, it has been our experience, too that PS is kind of slow. I have tried to profile this thing and found that there are many places where something is called several times over instead of just one time when needed.

Customizable

It was not difficult for me to build my first module or learn to modify the installed modules. However, I immediately found that is was much easier for me to create a CLASS and use it, instead, a module wasn't needed.

I will say, though that templating is a whole new ball of wax and I'd rather purchase a 3rd-party template and modify it than try to skin the thing myself.

Overall, I like PS, but the total lack of documentation, especially for developers, and the absolute lack of support from the PS developers in this forum is the biggest detriment to this product. I have been one of the loudest critics here.

I have been member of several rather large development communities for different products. I would say that this one have the least amount of developers of the product helping out. Now, it may be, and this is only my opinion, an effort to get everyone to purchase the supported version. I know of several products that do the exact same thing. Their developers will not answer questions in their peer support forums because it takes away from their support revenue and they are told that.

Simple things like getting changes made to this forum take weeks, if not months. I've made several suggestions to help improve this forum and they have all been put on the back burner, so to speak. Now that doesn't mean that the person(s) I reported these features to is neglecting them, it's just that this found is not being thought of as a priority at all in either feature additions or help by the developers.