PrestaShop 1.3 Beginner's Guide 59
johhnyb writes "PrestaShop 1.3, Beginner's Guide by John Horton does exactly what is suggested by the title in that it provides a comprehensive and detailed guide to novices looking to set up their own online shops. While it is aimed at total beginners it never talks down to the reader and neither does it merely scratch the surface of the topic requiring you to go off and search for the real valuable information somewhere else. This book takes you from clueless beginner (which I undoubtedly was) to someone equipped with the knowledge, resources and additional support to be quite confident in setting up an effective online retail presence (which I believe I now am)." Keep reading for the rest of johhnyb's review.
From the beginning, I was caught by the evident enthusiasm of the author and the fact he is clearly such an expert on the subject. I also liked the fact that he laid down his 'seven day challenge' and included some excerpts from his own 'story' throughout the book. Anyone who has even a faint idea about selling products online would undoubtedly benefit from this book as it gives you not just the technical information but the business input too. Likewise, if you already have an idea of what you want to sell and why it is a good product then you have a complete technical guide as to how to make that happen.| PrestaShop 1.3 Beginner's Guide | |
| author | John Horton |
| pages | 308 |
| publisher | Packt Publishing |
| rating | 9/10 |
| reviewer | johhnyb |
| ISBN | 1849511144 |
| summary | covers all you need to know about starting your own e-commerce business. |
It actually helps if you have at least a certain comfort level with some simple computing basics, but even if you don't the processes described are in sufficiently layman's terms to make it easy for almost anyone. I can be quite confident in saying that this book contains pretty much everything you will need to set up a sophisticated and successful online shop. It doesn't go crazy though and go off on any disingenuous tangents by, for example, trying to explain Content Management Systems or some other equally esoteric topic. Overall, I think an excellent balance is achieved.
PrestaShop 1.3, Beginner's Guide is written in a very chatty and engaging style and the author's personality comes through loud and clear — you really do feel like he wants to make it as easy as possible for you to succeed. It is always down-to-earth and although the author clearly knows his topic well, he does go to great lengths to take everything step by step and make it as absolutely logical as possible. The level of detail is sufficient if you have never covered the particular task before.The addition of screen shots is also very convenient and makes the process easier. The 'What just happened' section is particularly good and there are plenty of reassuring summaries throughout so you can feel the book is not just running away with itself and the reader can keep recycling and reprocessing the information. Most importantly, he has done it himself and made a success of it. He has set up over 10 online shops, has been through all the different options, experienced the pitfalls, the highs and lows, and is passing on the very best information and advice possible to a new lucky group of shop owners.
I found the book full of very solid advice which could applied in many settings. It is also a great introduction to some of the most modern forms of online marketing including the use of Twitter, Facebook, and Google Adwords. One thing I liked was John's regular reference to the need for a strong, viable business case. Prestashop is a magnificent product but will totally fall flat if your basic offering does not create a customer which Peter Drucker famously said was the purpose of business. It is too easy to fly into the detail of a business before taking time to fully understand your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and why people buy from you. Likewise, the author also covers key and hard-to-grasp issues like Search Engine Optimization which I think he correctly identifies as something readers will need to understand.
I can honestly say that PrestaShop 1.3, Beginner's Guide covers everything you will need. Not only that, John refers to several free resources he himself has written and provides an extensive list of resources at the end of the book.This book is almost encyclopedic in its treatment of how to set up and use Prestashop and it is certainly something that can used in that way. You don't only get Prestashop related material you also get a lot of valuable business advice, of course in a Prestashop context.Another benefit readers will receive is regular pointers to where they can find other free resources also written by the author.
I have to state clearly that John is a long-term friend of mine — to give you an idea we go back to those halcyon days of the Spectrum ZX-81 and the Commodore 64 — yes, we are getting on. Bearing this in mind, I have done my best to write something honest and useful to potential buyers of this book. Although he plays it down, John has always been marvelous with computers and able to effortlessly explain complex technical issues to me, a relative technophobe. Therefore, it does not surprise me he has written something so useful, practical and frankly inspiring.
You can purchase PrestaShop 1.3 Beginner's Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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php
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Re:What about the important stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, if I were to open "Red Flayer's Prosthetic Toe Emporium" online, I'd want to be focusing more on product selection, images, marketing, etc, rather than spending hours upon hours learning Joomla or Drupal and then learning how to integrate an eCommerce solution into my site. That's the nice thing about specialization.
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I looked into these PHP eCommerce site packages a while ago for my own little website, and was not impressed. (I looked at osCommerce, Magneto, err, Magento, ZenCart, and a bunch more just like these.) They all seem to be designed for high-volume sites with dozens to thousands of products, with very small descriptions for each product.
What I have is a small site with only 3 products (more coming eventually, but probably never more than 20, with different variants for some of them), but each product page
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Yeah, you're well and truly outside of the target market for ecommerce providers. You should look into something like this [conceptlogic.com], or a weekend-worth of custom development.
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Another possibility is a shopping cart plugin for Wordpress - you'll be able to do customization, but the initial useability / look-feel will be much quicker to get going.
what is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
would it really be that hard for the editors to add a blurb saying what prestashop is to the submission?
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It does
Re:what is it? (Score:4, Informative)
I was thinking the exact same thing. I read the entire review, simply looking for an explanation of PrestaShop [prestashop.com].
Apparently it's a PHP/MySQL app for running a web-based retail store. The core is released under the OSL 3.0 [opensource.org] license, but it seems [prestastore.com] that many add-on modules and themes are available for purchase.
This review makes no mention if you have to purchase anything to build a storefront using PrestaShop, or if the standard OSS version will suffice. Nor does this review give any technical details on setting the thing up, including any dependencies on existing relationships with payment processors / merchant accounts. Perhaps the author could have talked about the example store he setup, and used his praise of the book to illustrate his example.
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Outside of Appleville, we call this an ecommerce application.
In any event, PrestaShop is one of the more decent modern OS ecommerce applications (in PHP. If you're open-minded, look at Spree instead). You don't need to buy anything to get started, aside from the services of a development company for rebranding/customisation.
It is something you can buy (Score:3, Funny)
Does it really matter what it is? You have money, this costs money, therefore, you should spend your money on this. QED.
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mod parent up. Seriously. the only reason I clicked "read more" was to find out WTF PrestaShop was. Then the whole review... /the subject/prestashop/
This review could have been written by running a preg_replace on "Generic Book Review" (released under the GPL)
Gimp? (Score:4, Funny)
For a minute there I was hoping PrestaShop was the new name for the single-window version of Gimp. Ah well.
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Re:PHP? (Score:4, Insightful)
We're talking "Your favorite flash in the pan language of the day is SLOW, like a snail surfing a molasses wave in January." not "Omigahd! Ruby on Rails! Itz teh best! Like, everyone uses Ruby on Rails now and PHP is so last week, get with the program, we all laugh at PHP programmers now, they're like, lame. Super lame o rama lame. You don't want to be lame, do you? Come on,m use Ruby on Rails, validate my choice, all the cool kids are doing it."
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With the sentence:"We're talking "WebShop for beginners", not "Amazon" I already admitted, that RoR may not be the best solution for every task. Ok, it's slow, but there are cases where that doesn't matter at all. WebShop for beginners is such a case. You have somebody with no programming experience and he wants to setup a shop. Then PHP isn't the best choice, period. There are many projects I wouldn't do in Ruby, but I have written several Webshops and similar w
Shove your cookie (Score:4, Insightful)
Allow me to quote your BS back at you, you know, the one you got modded down for? "webshop for beginners in PHP? Isn't this that language everybody forgot luckily, since we got Ruby on Rails?"
Given that WebShop is obviously for non programmers, who gives a rats ass what it is written in? I'm tired of language evangelists trying to claim their novelty language of the day is the One True. Nobody cares what your opinion of PHP or Ruby on Rails is, m'kay?
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This being the Internet, when you joke about controversial things, you should make it clear that it is a joke. When your joke is indistinguishable from something an actual wingnut would say, you need to be especially clear. And when it comes to language and OS fanbois, your statement isn't even unusual. But sure, if you say you were joking, I can see that, and apologize for being a jerk. The sad thing is, there are so many sycophantic fanbois out there who would say something like that in utter seriousness,
Re: Controversial (Score:1)
I just thought, that my additional comments would have made it clear enough, that I decide about languages based on project demands.
I hated those fan discussions already back in the 80s (Commodore Atari; Pascal Basic C) whatsoever.
Actually one reason why I don't miss that Ruby on Rails Job that much (though I liked the framework plus the lang
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short answer: the cheapest hosting providers didn't forget it yet.
used it (Score:1, Informative)
I used it once:
- from their site "Delivery fees billing by price or weight" http://www.prestashop.com/en/allfeatures#catalog. The most important word is or, which means that you can't accurately enter Royal Mail fees (you pay by weight but also by price, actually by the total value of the package; if it gets lost you will get some money back according to the declared value).
- GoDaddy it's just a poor choice to host a PrestaShop site. The shop will try to send emails in a specific way, it fills the From: fie
Quick Question for Reviewer (Score:2, Insightful)
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Just consider this:
- you can import products in bulk but you can't export them
- you can't edit products in bulk: ex. increase all the prices by 5$, or select 10-20 products and edit them in one page. All the time you have to edit product by product unless you install some extension for bulk editing
- if you decide to "regenerate thumbnails" while having thousands of products it
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I mis-read it as "Photoshop 1.3" (Score:2)
I mis-read it as, "Photoshop 1.3 Beginner's Guide"
And I thought, "Wow! Now THERE'S something really interesting! I wonder what the author's logic was to have gone and written a modern book on such an out-of-date piece of software? Cool!"
Then it got boring very fast. -Not that the real subject isn't interesting and relevant, but it sure isn't as intriguing as the false idea!
-FL
Presta shop guide, pimping you presta shop. (Score:3, Informative)
of course, thats leaving out the fact that 6 months into your presta online eshop ( or any other ecommerce software for that matter ) you will have to migrate to oscommerce because of the paranormally high module base and universal provider support.
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Maybe you could only let people download an URL to a one-time-download script after buying, instead of downloading the complete file directly?
Or is that too complicated? OTOH, people downloading software online should have some sort of triple-digit IQ...
Other question: how does PrestaShop compare to Magento and Oxid eShop?
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'pretty powerful'. (Score:2)
magento has 54,000+ files. it does 2 to 3000 inserts to db per order. yeah, you heard it right. you would need an entry level dedicated server to run a small shop with it. it is also coded intentionally roundabout, so that 3rd party development will be harder, and users will have to go to original developers. the new
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I gather you took a Magento project and it went pretty badly? Happens a lot. It is also used in lots of project which don't really fit its feature set, etc.
Once you get past the steep learning curve, it's actually a very decent system, with a few flaws. Can also run pretty snappily if you set it up properly.
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PrestaShop is smaller, has fewer features, and is almost certainly a better choice if it fits your requirements. Also look into LemonStand and OpenCart for other light-weight but high(er) quality PHP ecommerce applications.
yeah. 'codebase written in 1999'. (Score:2)
in the ecommerce trenches your 'codebase', new trends, new coding concepts matter zit. in production environment what matters are budget, time, function.
oh so it took you no time to write so and so many modules and install them for prestashop then ? grreat. now do it for random obscure sh
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experience.
you dont have it.
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Maybe so. I can not really say because I never tried PrestaShop.
No offense, but if Magento is "way better" then PrestaShop must seriously suck.
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But be careful if you want to 'do a little hacking' of Magento. The learning curve is really unpleasant.
Prestashop should be avoided - very badly coded (Score:2, Informative)
Prestashop is a fine shopping cart software if your needs and demands are extremely simple.
I started my webshop with prestashop and over the last couple years I've seriously customized it to fit my needs. Several million dollars of sales have since passed through the shop, so believe me when I tell you it has serious shortcomings:
* Can not handle multi-currencies well at all (not all modules of the software convert the values correctly). Just to give an example, if a customer wants a voucher refund in a cur
hii (Score:1)
hiii (Score:1)