Hopefully, you are well into creating a great PrestaShop shop and you’ve had help using our Prestashop Education Channel. To complement this information we have been reviewing the PrestaShop forums for advice that we can pass along that are considered best practices for setting up an online shop. This information is compiled from both customers and the PrestaShop experts themselves so please try to see if it applies to your own installation and adopt the practices that best work for you and your growing business.
Advice for the process of building an ecommerce shop
- If possible, when you are developing your PrestaShop shop, make sure to use your Maintenance mode. You may even want to try using third party maintenance mode add-ons that add more functionality. For example, some enable countdown modes which give customers more information than – “site is under construction or maintenance”. You can also do this yourself by creating a separate HTML page to display during your construction phase.
- Make sure to create daily backups of your files. Back ups are available through InMotion Hosting, but it’s recommended that you keep backups of your own through FTP or third-party. This would help you recover from unexpected changes or problems with your shop.
- Keep your shop organized, keep the presentations simple, clean and up-to-date. Provide ways for your customer to provide feedback and do not overwhelm them with information.
- Use your customer feedback to build relationships with your customers. Use social media to help build a customer base that is informed about your shop and eager to pass on this information to others. These days, search engines like Google, place value with your customer feedback in addition to the timely and relevant information that you provide to your customers. These interactions help to create a customer base that can be the foundation to your business.
- If you are using templates, then be aware that changes may not immediately appear – especially if you are caching your PrestaShop website. If you are using a custom template, then make sure that you go into Advanced preferences and enable Force Compile in the Performance section. This will help keep your udpates from not appearing due to a cached page.
- Make the steps for checkout easy to understand and provide for proper shipping of purchased content.
- If you need further functionality, you may not need to re-develop the “wheel” – it may already be available to you. Check out the modules available in the PrestaShop Marketplace.
- Make it a habit to periodically evaluate your shop so that you can make timely changes as necessary. Keeping it fresh and relevant will keep people coming back to your site.
Purchasing Products – a Customer’s Perspective
If you need help with any particular item, make sure to bear in mind the PrestaShop Education channel for much more information regarding the use of PrestaShop.
