Nowadays eCommerce industry offers numerous choices and opportunities. However, there are two unconditional leaders that have won the market, the customer trust and the worldwide recognition. Whether you like it or not, if you work in eCommerce industry you should face it – PrestaShop and Magento are far ahead the other solutions with regard to the amount of stores established on the platforms, the number of features added and the largest communities of users and developers. It’s not a monopoly, it’s the competition. What exactly makes these shopping carts so popular, in spite of drawbacks? Let’s consider some of the aspects to answer the question.
Business ecommerce image from Shutterstock.
What’s Good About Magento
- Magento is built on Zend Framework. It offers solid modular architecture which makes it the most scalable and flexible platform you can ever imagine;
- The platform provides you with freedom of customization. You get the power to manage and control your store the way you like it (with a certain level of programming skills of course);
- Magento provides merchants with powerful built-in SEO features for high search engine rankings and traffic rates;
- A rich set of features that the shopping cart offers are not available with other carts and make it special;
- Magento can handle big enterprise businesses with its advanced multi-store function.
What’s Good About PrestaShop
- PrestaShop is a lightweight software easy to download and install;
- The platform is suitable for small and middle businesses. It is the best solution for start ups as the store launch is simple, the learning curve is not so steep, as with Magento, you don’t require advanced programming skills to manage store successfully;
- PrestaShop is not demanding in terms of hosting. It doesn’t require dedicated servers as Magento to show high speed of performance;
- PrestaShop provides world class support which provides solutions to customers requirements with the speed of lightning.
Having considered some general aspects let’s move to the platform design opportunities, as the storefront look is what greatly affects customers’ shopping experience and merchants’ business income respectively.
Magic Magento Templates
Magento stores can boast of great interface look and feel due to the following options that are provided:
- JQuery easy integration For those who are new to design management – JQuery is a JavaScript library that facilitates rapid web development;
- New products grid makes the structure of store clear, slender and well organized;
- Simple footer and two column view;
- Product zoom helps customers take a closer look at the items (as the devil is in the details);
- Cross-sells and related products are located on product page which makes product search more effective;
- Advanced checkout page helps reduce cart abandonment;
- Customizable and SEO friendly themes make Magento design meet high requirements.
Pretty PrestaShop Themes
After such a powerful Magento template “performance”, let’s see how PrestaShop can retort:
- Due to brand slider the platform enables shoppers to search products by brands;
- PrestaShop offers an opportunity to set grid view for products on listing page;
- Such features as Specials, Quick View of cart, manufacturers, new arrivals are available.
Smart Platforms with Smarty Templates
It is worth mentioning that both PrestaShop cart and Magento use Smarty template system. It is written in PHP and generates content in peculiar way placing special tags which are then processed and substituted with other code.
A good conclusion to a short comparative review of platforms would be the words of users, who actually tried to manage these platforms, and express their experience in the internet sources. These feedback are unbiased and reveal both strong and weak shopping cart sides.
“Magento is a robust, scalable and highly customizable eCommerce solution. Offering connectivity facilities to external system such as stock management and accounting. Plus, eBay bought it last year so it must be good!”
“Magento is more polished, but also a beast to modify.”
“I am not a programmer so I am confined to noob-like needs. At first, I tried Magento, and found
it to be difficult.”
“PrestaShop is your best bet. The only problem with PrestaShop is that it uses smarty template
engine and they have made it a very great deal of effort to theme.”
“PrestaShop makes simple things complicated. It relies on forum users and third party plugins
instead of offering a stable and frequent development or new features.”
Source : blog[dot]templatemonster[dot]com
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