Prestashop compared to Zen-Cart and osCommerce [cl

Question

I'm considering Prestashop for a new project. It seems to be younger than Zen-Cart and osCommerce. Since I just found it by Google, I'd like to gather comments and experience and comparison of Prestashop to established "brands" like Zen-Cart and osCommerce

Answer 1

PrestaShop is an impressive new entry to the field, with a very attractive user interface and impressive product option/variant capabilities (like Zen Cart attributes). One downside is that it's much harder to modify; there is nothing like the Zen Cart "templating " capability so you're always changing core files. This gets hard to manage with the frequent release schedule PrestaShop is using. But you should definitely install it and spend some time testing it and evaluating its suitability for your shop.

Answer 2

Prestashop has been growing and improving extremely fast, both in number of users / forum members, and in development / features added.

A good resource to start with is the new book "[PrestaShop 1.3 Beginner's Guide]", it goes though all the important features in Prestashop and guide you towards getting your shop online and having your first sale in one week.

In addition to doing technical review for the book, I am also an English Moderator on the Prestashop forum, and I see people with no programming or website development background manage to install and customize their own shops, add themes, modules and modification with little or no help.

The [Prestashop forum] has been growing rapidly as well, it reached nearly 90,000 members, and is by far the best place to get help or questions answered, usually within a short period of time. Make sure you search the forum first, because many questions have already been answered…

Answer 3

I found prestashop more powerful but to customize it you must have knoeledge on CSS , smarty template and php. For me it is better than Zen and Os

Answer 4

The prestashop as good as it looks has still very little or no documentation and or ridicilously complex written smarty templ. stuff, driving us "open source" fanatics, like cattle into bottleneck traps forced to buy our way out.

Don't forget it's a company! they are even hiring at the moment. and we will be caught.

and imho, "open source" by a company? reaping all the benefits of community development, organising predators and game refuge paths for a nice game hunting season.

Answer 5

prestashop is much easier than zen cart, oscommerce and magento. the easiest thing to do is try to install them as they are all free.

Answer 6

We install and review all open source eCommerce solutions as a matter of course. So we have looked in depth at all the one mentioned here. I prefer osCommerce to Prestashop. Prestashop is too immature and simply does not have the in-built functionality or breadth of Add Ons. It is not a "lite" version of Magento by any means.

As to the other poster's comment about osCommerce and Magento. Magento is an out of the box solution which is very difficult to customize. You need to be a programmer to work with it and even then the learning curve is steep. And if you do customize, you then are buying out of their upgrade path. Which is why the average site does not customize and why so many Magento stores look so much alike.

Unlike Magento, osCommerce has and always will be intended as a core eCommerce solution on which you build you own unique eCommerce solution.

Two different approaches to building an eCommerce site. One is cookie cutter then other is fast track to custom solution.