PrestaShop 1.5 Beginner's Guide: Build your own attractive online store with this fast and flexible e-commerce solution , Second Edition

Dashboard is the landing page you get to when you log in to your back office. Here, you can take a quick look about your shop activity, customer services, statistics, configuration checklist, PrestaShop news and links, and quick links to different sections on the Web such as Products sold recently, new orders, or new products.

This section contains all the content that you want to sell to your customer. The Products subsection contains all the items that are in your store. The Categories subsection is the easiest way to keep a tidy store; to make it easier for our customers to find our products, we split our products into different categories. In the Monitoring section, we can track multiple issues of concern in your product inventory. Attributes and Values is the area where you can set up new attributes for your products, such as color, size, and so on. Features can relate to physical dimensions or other characteristics of the product. Manufacturers is the section where we add the companies that make a particular product. The Suppliers section contains the information that can help us get more products. Image Mapping is used to create a hotspot on an image. The Tags section is used for assigning short descriptions (tags) to the products. Sometimes, you may need to provide a file (such as a manual or software...

This is the best part of an e-commerce shop; you will be able to see all the orders and everything that you sold. Also, this section will contain invoices, merchandise returns, delivery slips, credit slips, statuses, and order messages.

Every customer or person that signed up will be shown in this section. Here you can check all the information about our clients. You may also split your customers in different groups, such as a VIP group, to offer different discounts or different products.

If any of your customers did not check out, you can see what they have in their shopping cart.

In this section, we will set up and detail the information on customer services and contacts. This is very important because if you take care of your clients, the clients speak well about your store, and that is the best publicity you can get for your shop.

This section could be one of our clients’ favorites because this is where the vouchers and discounts for your clients are listed.

If the products that you are selling are digital, then this section is not for you. In this section, we will set up the pricing, rules, and carriers to deliver your products.

Under localization, you can set up the different languages that you would like to offer on your website, all the countries that you want to sell your products to, taxes, and currencies.

This is one of the most important sections on your site because this is where all the functionality and design is. For that, we will cover this section in detail.

We are now going to create a shopping cart module:

First let’s discuss what goes on the home page and then it’s time for action to actually add your new content to the home page.

PrestaShop has a really easy-to-use CMS. CMS is an acronym for Content Management System. It will allow you to create and label content and then enable links to it. We will see more of this when we create your “must have” pages, in a minute, and when we look at the CMS in more depth in Chapter 4, Getting More Customers. PrestaShop deals with home page content in a slightly different way. It uses another module called the Home text editor. Here goes:

Having decided upon the text for all of your pages, it is time to actually create them.

Make sure that you are logged into your PrestaShop control panel and then follow these steps:

The Preferences tab has everything you need to customize your shop in different ways. You will find the following subsections under the Preferences tab:

This is really easy to do. The trick to achieving something unique here is to experiment. Try some really big sizes and consider decreasing the number of products per page at the same time, especially if you have a small niche range or sell products with interesting or detailed images. Here is how:

Themes are what distinguish one PrestaShop-powered store from another. They define the color, graphics, and even the actual ambience of your store. For example, if you are running a shop selling guns, you will want a very different theme compared to the one selling teddy bears.

Themes are readily available for PrestaShop—many are free and many are not. What follows is a low down on where and how to find a theme for your shop. In my view, getting the right theme is only the beginning of creating the perfect look for your e-commerce establishment.

I strongly recommend hunting high and low for the theme that most closely suits your purposes and then installing it. All this is covered here and now. I also suggest, once you are up and running, that you embark on a process of further customization. This will truly separate your store from everyone else’s and, along with all the other elements discussed in this book, leave you with an absolutely unique store.

The process of template...

Here’s how to do it:

Here, as the heading suggests, we will look at customizing our chosen template. Creating a template from scratch is too in-depth for the space we have here and involves a skill I am not qualified to teach. The skill I am referring to is design. “Click here”, “Click there” type of instructions don’t help when trying to design something. If you really want to start from scratch, I would recommend you to get two kinds of books: the first on CSS, and another on design and layout principles.

The beauty of customizing an existing template is that all the tricky coding has been done for us; all we need to do is identify key elements of somebody else’s work and make amendments to it. We can then choose a template whose overall shape and style we like, and use it as a starting point; we can change it in subtle or not so subtle ways to better suit our business and to make sure that our website is unique.

Now we will look at some “quick wins” for simple customization, then the...

It’s really easy to create a new template. The trick to achieving something unique here is to experiment. Try some really big sizes and perhaps consider decreasing the number of products per page at the same time, especially if you have a small niche range or sell products with interesting or detailed images. Here’s how:

So you now have your logo graphic. Here is how to add it to your shop:

In this section, we can check how our server is working and set up new backups for our database, among others.

The Configuration Information subsection is where we get to see all the configuration information that our server is giving us and whether it is in accordance with our PrestaShop store, and also whether there are some missing files.

The Performance tab is important to set up a cache for our site. Caching is a technique to save documents (HTML pages, images, and so on) temporarily to reduce bandwidth and connections to our database, we then get a faster service.

The E-mail tab lists the e-mail to which customers send messages from the orders page.

The DB Backup tab can be used to do a backup of our database. It is very important to keep in mind that we need to do backups very often because if something goes wrong with our hosting, we could lose all our information. This in turn would mean that we would not be able to sell any of our products, especially...

Now it is time to create an account for yourself in your own shop. This will be useful now, and later as well. It is especially useful because the My Account module is only visible to customers who have logged in. Follow these steps to create your own account:

Here we can see how our customers use our website, what items are bestsellers, and the time and date at which you have a peak hour.

All of this information is very important and comes in handy when a particular area is not working fine for the customer or when you need to work on a new campaign to focus on an area.

What follows here, is a discussion of the pages you would probably expect to find on any e-commerce website. I will go through each in turn, discuss their purpose, and make some suggestions about creating your own version of the page.

What if someone needs to contact you? Perhaps they need to ask a question, complain, or just say hello.

We are going to divide your shop into departments to give it a more professional feel and to create confidence in the customers that send you messages. Remember that when we create these contacts and assign e-mail addresses, you will need to have previously created them through your hosting account.

The multistore feature is a new functionality in PrestaShop 1.5. With this functionality, you can easily manage several stores at once with only one back office, which means that it will make your life easier.

Every store is independent, but you could share categories, products pages, and so on. This functionality is very useful if you’re working with different markets.

A downloadable product is an item that we do not need to ship. These kinds of items are usually songs in the .mp3 format, books in the .pdf format, or software.

When we are selling an item like this, and we choose to add a new product, we have to choose the type of item on the main page; in this case, it will be Virtual Product. After this is done, PrestaShop will ask whether this product has an associated file; we need to click on Yes and we can then upload the file to sell.

If you have been working with osCommerce, welcome to PrestaShop. Importing all your information is very easy. The first thing that you have to do it is to go to Modules, then scroll down to Importer osCommerce on the modules list and click on the Install button. Once you have this module installed, you will need to follow the same process as the one detailed before, but with the module Shop Importer.

When you have both modules installed and active, click on Configure link under Shop Importer. You will then see a drop-down menu. Select Importer osCommerce and click on Choose. Fill in all the fields and click on Import to start the process.

We achieved quite a lot in this chapter. Specifically, we covered:

Now that you have got a shop with essential pages, features, and content, it is time to give our customers some products to buy. That is the subject of the next chapter.