Prestashop Review –Advantages and Disadvantages

You probably have heard about Magento, WooCommerce, and Shopify, ¿what about PrestaShop? This platform although not so known as these other platforms is one of the most secure and reliable for e-commerce websites. The French e-commerce platform, founded in 2007 offers an easy to use interface which is 100% free to download and is completely equipped to run a successful e-store. Their main headquarters are located in Paris, and their numerous 100+ team offers multi-language customers support for almost 270.000 shops that were created with this platform. What are their main Advantages and Disadvantages?
Advantages

It is 100% free to download and operate if you’re comfortable using a specific version you are not obliged to upgrade to the newest version. Sometimes newer versions are filled with bugs and take some time to be stabilized to incorporate functions that already run successfully on older versions.
While it is 100% to run and to build your e-commerce store in this platform, it, however, requires the installation of several plugins that can be quite costly. Price can range from 30 to 200 Euros but since it’s an open code platform it’s also possible to create your own plugins.
If you’re not tech savvy it is highly recommendable to hire a web developer to help you tailor PrestaShop to fulfill your needs.
It has recently launched a hosted plan for first-time users called PrestaShop ready, which is a quick solution for new PrestaShop users.
Its back end interface is one of the best for e-commerce platforms. It has a highly customizable interface and prebuilt themes are some of the best.
Server resources to run a PrestaShop store are fewer than in any other e-commerce platform, which implies that websites built in PrestaShop have a lower average speed page load time.
Besides being 100% free to download PrestaShop also offers a demo version for new users to check out its interface with pre-built content to get a grasp of how to operate its main features. This demo version provides a complete version of a real PrestaShop website and allows users to explore the admin panel and basic back end customization.
Since PrestaShop is a platform specifically built for e-commerce unlike woo-commerce for example, its overall security is high and websites built with PrestaShop are less likely to be endangered with malicious code if an SSL certificate is installed.

Disadvantages
Prestashop is definitely not the easiest platform to operate, its basic back end structure is built with modules that sometimes can cause problems and interfere with each other. It's recommendable to hire a web developer or designer to help you with problems that could arise in the design process. Its paid modules and plugins are quite costly and if you’re looking to integrate Amazon modules or third-party applications it can certainly increase tour overall expenses.