In earlier days people were not much used to performing online shopping especially while sharing their confidential information like credit card, debit card and bank account details. But the time has changed now and people have started believing on online purchasing rather than standing in long lines in shopping malls.
One of the major parts to changing customers minds and to start believing on online shopping is the robust online shopping software and increased security specially when dealing with confidential information like credit/debit card and/or bank account details.
The main reason behind writing this article is to highlight one of the best Ecommerce Software available in market, Prestashop. This in order to manage their online store and it has a proven level of security as well.
So will start by covering major features of back office of Prestashop.
Full Featured Dashboard
Prestashop back office dashboard comes full of extra ordinary widgets. Using those widgets store owners can quickly get a glimpse of what’s on in store now. Let me highlight few widgets from those.
Sales, Orders and Profit
In this widget the shop owner can review current orders and profit in a graphical manner.
Current Status Widget
In this small widget, the admin can get current status of store products, current pending orders, out of stock products, etc.
Google Analytics Integration
The back office admin can configure their Google Analytic in order to get the status of a visitor, returning customer, traffic source, etc.
Catalog Management
When it comes to management of catalog of an online store, as a store owner Prestashop would be best buddy for you. Yes it’s really true because it is very well designed and has a streamline process of managing your products and inventory make your life easier when it’s comes to managing your online store. I would like to highlight few of the major features which plays major role here.
- Unlimited Products, Attributes and Categories
- Improved Stock Management
- Downloadable Products (Software, T.V. Shows, etc)
Customer Management
This one is another major aspect which is really most important for the store owner. Why this is important because the store owner can use their customer details to stay in touch with them via various ways and ultimately which helps them to improve sales on their store. Customers are also more careful while posting their details on online store, so it is really important to have it stored in secured manner.
Localization
When you create your shop, it will be accessible from all around the world and hence you will need you products and prices and multiple languages and currencies as well. PrestaShops team has built very advance tracking system, using a software which will automatically identify a customer’s location and calculate taxes and other charges as per set by shop owner.
Shipping Management
Prestashop software comes with inbuilt features of integration with multiple carriers along with the ability to manage/control logistics like weight, fees, etc from the Prestashop back office.
One more point I want to add here is that, Prestashop has inbuilt integration with top shipping carries like USPS, FedEx and UPS. So this way customer will have a greater number of choices to choose from. Please have a look at snap below which shows management of different carries in back-office.
Advance Reporting
Along with all above feature, strong reporting is really needed for the store owner. This will give an idea on how they are performing on a sale, are they gaining or losing, etc. I would like to highlight one of the features of Prestashop which you will find in Prestashop only which is “Real-time Net Profit Margin”.
This will give an idea to store owner about their sales and profits instantly.
So now what we have so far is just back-office features. Now I am going to cover a few important features of front end store of PrestaShop software. It’s obvious that all those feature will be controlled by back-office.
Layered Navigation
Layered navigation will allow customer to filter products based on their preferences. It gives you all possible option to filter from all available products in shop. Let me give you few example attributes which can be a part of layered navigation. This attributes can be price, color, size, categories, etc.
Cross Selling
A very efficient algorithm developed by PrestaShops team to show related products for the current product which you are looking at. Cross selling of product is kind of giving suggestion to customer to show related products so they can have better idea of what other products are available in store.
Product Comparison
As a customer this is really very important feature to have in online store especially when you have multiple products available which you are looking at. This feature will allow customer to compare more than one product side by side and customer can review/compare products at single attribute level.
Easy Checkout Process
Different surveys prove that long and complex checkour processes will reduce chances to complete the purchase of products and that’s why it really important to have easy and short checkout process.
To achieve this, the PrestaShop team has come up with the concept of one page checkout and guest checkout which can reduce multiple page loadings and allow user to proceed with checkout without creating account.
Payment Methods
PrestaShop software supports multiple payment gateway integration which admin can enable with single click. Having multiple reputed payment in site will increase chance to complete a product purchase on your store. Also different customers have their own choice of preferred payment gateways to pay with.
Now I have covered major features of back office and front end store as well. Now above all these features security is a key part to gain customer confidence. To gain customer confidence, PrestaShop is following PCI Compliance so your credit card and other details can be stored in secure manner. Additionally all cookies and session stored by PrestaShop is encrypted so that can’t be traced by any other.
So guys, I have tried my best to cover all major features of this PrestaShop software but this is not it. There are many other features which are very important and I am not able to add those here. So you can have all those reviewed at following URL. Prestashop Features.
Additionally if you want to have all these features reviewed personally then I would suggest following this link for the demo of Front Store and Back Office.
If you want to give a try with your own then best way is to download Prestashop software and do the trick with it.
