PrestaShop is a free, open source e-commerce solution available under the Open Software License and officially launched in August 2007. The software is written in PHP and based on the Smarty template engine and is currently used by 165,000 shops worldwide. The PrestaShop group was founded in Paris, with a second Headquarters opened in Miami in 2011. PrestaShop is translated into 63 languages, with English, French, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Russian having full…
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Squarespace
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Squarespace is a CMS platform that allows users to create a DIY blog, eCommerce store, and/or portfolio (visual art or music). Some Squarespace website and shop templates are industry or use case-specific, such as menu builders for restaurant sites.
This is a great system for small and medium businesses dealing from 1 product to 100,000 products. It is elegant to use and very stable. The system may not be great for converting into a marketplace and the handling of > 1million products. The system is also not suitable for services selling like events, registrations, subscriptions and ticket bookings etc.
I have a gorgeous website that I made myself, thanks to Squarespace. I'm able to integrate marketing emails, SEO, analytics, online carts, pretty much instantly. If you want to get started fast, it's really great. I think if you want to customize square space and you're having trouble, it would be most helpful to hire a square space designer. That's what I would have done in retrospect.
The PayPal button modality was integrated with the PrestaShop system, which helped our clients to complete payments digitally in just a few seconds, this integrated button allowed to streamline many transactions.
Performing inventory reviews and modifying the PrestaShop catalog was one of the things that I liked the most, I could make changes to the catalog, make changes to the conditions of the products in the catalog and all those changes were reflected on my website in a instant, no need to wait some time.
The PrestaShop system created a digital invoice for each client who made the advance payment of a property, which made it even easier to complete the property negotiation. Customers came to our company with the digital invoice for the advance payment and it was easy to identify the property that was paid, thanks to the digital invoice.
Stupid simple to use. I know very creative people who cannot code and this is probably the easiest ever platform for them!
Pretty website templates and great functionality with showing off portfolios.
They've already figured out what are the problems that non-coding people have when creating websites and they've figured out a simple solution for all of it.
It's simple to use for someone who is really good with computers as well as those who are not. I've been using my personal squarespace for years and have also helped clients build a starting page which they are later able to manage theirselves.
Since we use PrestaShop OpenSource there is only community support. What we found is that many other users fight with the same problems and there seems no solution or input from the PrestaShop developers' side.
Help is available directly from the back end and uses full sentence searching to find answers to questions others may have asked before. With a ton of articles and support questions documents, it is very likely that your question has been answered. If not each page has the ability to open a direct email to support. Each case has a number and can be followed. Responses are often quick and have links and directions clearly stated
It's a no-brainer for e-commerce stores. BigCommerce and Magento both far out-distanced PrestaShop in every major category. If you're just getting into e-commerce, I would highly recommend either BigCommerce or Magento. Their online documentation and support far outweigh any advantages you'd have over going with an open source software like PrestaShop.
Overall, as a designer, it makes perfect sense for small to large businesses to use a site such as SquareSpace. Costs are relatively reasonable with the ability to go in and do custom code.
The issue is certain aspects of it, depending on the plan, you can't do. So, if you want to do API to the site, you need to use the top-tier program to do so. Even at custom code, you won't have access to the API section.
As well, like all templates and themes, everybody is using the same style too.
It slowed down our Hosting service. Our website took a long time to fully load on our clients' devices due to the high consumption of the integration with the PrestaShop service.
It provided us with a fast billing service, where our clients obtained invoices in PDF mode for the electronic payments they made for the properties. These digital invoices helped us to recognize the property they wanted faster and streamlined the negotiation process.
The templates that had an optimized design, were too expensive, this caused that our catalog design was very simple and did not capture the interest of customers.
The key positive impact on my overall business objectives is how simple Squarespace sites are to implement new information. Whenever our services change, we can quickly update pages or even change how the website flows, in a very short window of time. This allows me to get back to more urgent work sooner.
Our Squarespace site for Club Swim Show helped present our web series to potential partners; Club Swim Show went on to partner with a popular swimming magazine and reach a larger audience through that magazine's hosting thanks to the professional design of our original website.
Squarespace does not bring in customers to my storefront, which is fine for me, since I sell things infrequently and it is not my main business, but might work against someone who is expecting a Shopify or Etsy level connection with buyer markets.
