Starting an e-commerce business comes with its own set of challenges. The foremost thing that comes to mind is selecting the right e-commerce platform.
Today, more than 370 eCommerce development platforms are available in the market, and coming up with the right choice is critical. A single mistake can ruin your whole business because the market has become very competitive now.
According to the latest stats, the ecommerce market grew by 44% in 2020, and it will increase to 50% in 2025. Thus, you have to pull up your socks tight to secure your business’s future in the market, and an e-commerce platform is the first thing here.
Among other popular CMS of the market, PrestaShop and nopCommerce enjoys great popularity. But again, you have to choose one; thus, you have to do a detailed analysis of nopCommerce vs. Prestashop.
To help you out, I have listed the complete features, pros, and cons of Prestashop and nopCommerce. It will help you in making the right choice between nopCommerce vs. Prestashop.
So, let’s begin this technological drive by choosing between PrestaShop or nopCommerce:
Table of Contents
What is PrestaShop?
PrestaShop is a freemium e-commerce website builder available today. It’s an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP with MySQL’s support. The platform was published under the Open Software License in 2008.
The top industry verticals like lifestyle, e-commerce, IT, and more today are using PrestaShop. You can see every 6.55% of lifestyle and e-commerce sectors worldwide are utilizing its potential for their business.
Explore the Top Features of PrestaShop:
1. Performance
Fast loading speed is always essential in any website, and that’s what you can get with PrestaShop e-commerce development. It provides your website with a delightful experience while shopping.
Several add-ons like Cache Manager and Page Cache Ultimate Module are even available in Prestashop, improving the website speed if you are not satisfied with the speed. These modules have a strategy of caching the whole page to reduce page loading time.
Do you know what merchants also choose this platform over others? The reason being is, that it’s time-saving plus provides easy navigation. Thus customers can view and shop more with ease.
2. Ease of Use
PrestaShop doesn’t require any special technical skills except some basic coding skills. If you want perfection, you can hire a Prestashop developer; it will bring your business vision to life.
Take a look at its dashboard once:
It’s a dashboard that you can access once you run the software. At this point, you have to figure out the modules you need for your store. If you are a non-technical person, you should consult a PrestaShop developer; he’ll take care of the integrations.
Once you’ve got your site up, daily operations become pretty simple. For example, you can list SEO features, categories, product descriptions, and quantities to your online store simultaneously.
The main page of product management allows you to do multiple things such as description, price, quantity, adding a title, and more. You can work through the tabs at the top of the page to ensure the best product listing. Now merchants can try and test the category to organize products. It will make the management process of primary and sub-categories easier.
Order management is a piece of cake in PrestaShop. You can add, edit orders and apply discounts direct from the admin panel. Also, you contact your customer via from order page. If you already have a well set up initially, you will handle your store rightly in the future.
3. SEO
SEO-optimized websites have become a necessity these days to get the desired organic traffic. Therefore, your website should rank in the top SERPs; it’s the only best way to get the desired leads.
Prestashop comes with pretty solid built-in SEO features. The platform offers 180+ modules for page indexing; it will save you a lot of time. With it, you can control how the products appear in search engines, including meta titles, descriptions, and permalinks. Also, you can set up page redirects if required.
4. Themes & Customizations
Prestashop offers countless customization possibilities, which means merchants can customize their stores freely as per their requirements. Though, in this competitive digital world, launching a memorable brand guarantees you long-term success.
Fortunately, with PrestaShop, you can access the 3200+ templates plus a massive collection of customizable themes in its Marketplace – Addons. Unfortunately, however, none of these themes are available for free, and their price varies from $59.00 to $349.99, depending on the quality. But many service providers are also available in the market providing Prestashop themes.
5. Inventory Management
PrestaShop provides an advanced process of managing your stock where you can:
Update Stock with Supplier: Import the stocks from any file locations or format from your supplier. It can track all sync history with a completely automated process and check results without worrying about raw data adjustments.
Sync with Third-Party Systems: Update buyers, orders, and items from any files you got from external systems or export mailing lists, sales, and any database.
Restock Inventory Smartly: Keep an eye on bestsellers, out-of-stock items, and hot items in your e-store.
Sync with Sales channels & Accounting: Get all transactions in one place to keep complete control over the system while selling products on eBay, Amazon, and integrating with QuickBooks.
Analyze Sales and Stock Level: Do an accurate analysis of your sales activities, Prestashop stock level, and incoming. Retailers can use “take an action” reports that state what you should do better than checking silent statistics.
6. Payment Gateways
PrestaShop provides you with 250 options for payments in total from the third-party processor or a merchant account. Thus, it will not direct customers to third-party websites during checkout, and they will remain fully compliant with all regulations, especially GDPR.
The platform also provides an extra service collaborating with PayPal called PrestaShop 1.7 Paypal Module. In addition, it provides access to different checkout options, like Mastercard, American Express, etc.
7. Marketing
With PrestaShop, you can advertise on Google Ads, Facebook, Amazon Ads, Instagram, and other popular platforms. It also eliminates the complexity of tracking conversion and setting up data feeds.
Some best features of Prestashop Marketing include:
- Product health check
- eCommerce Price comparison
- Competitor Analysis
- Multi-platform access
8. Support & Security
While setting up your e-commerce store, you may need assistance from experts. For this, you will find many free info sources such as guides, tutorials, FAQs, and training courses for developers and users.
If you still do not get your problem sorted, you can call the Presta professionals within 15 minutes to solve any problem. But, unfortunately, it’s a paid one and costs you around $249 to $1399, depending on the support level.
The Pros of PrestaShop
- It is open-source, and thus available for free.
- It’s easy to install, and you can set up your store with ease.
- It provides a large number of customization options.
- Thousands of plugins are available there that you can choose according to your requirements.
- Clear & well-structured workflow with customer management and emails.
The Cons of PrestaShop
- Provides limited scalability; thus, you can’t plan to expand your business further.
- The platform lacks multistore functionality.
- No official support team is available to solve your problems.
What is nopCommerce?
nopCommerce, an open-source e-commerce solution introduced in 2008 for small to medium-sized businesses in the market. It’s based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET Core framework and MS SQL Server 2012 backend database.
The platform offers its users a catalog frontend and an administration tool backend, allowing shopping cart creation. As a result, many top industries like e-commerce, IT, and more are using the nopCommerce today.
Explore the Top Features of nopCommerce:
1. OpenSource
nopCommerce is open-source, thus available free. It gives tough competition to other e-commerce development platforms in cost and quality both. Therefore, here you have to pay no license fee, no monthly fee, or lump sum fee. Its back-end support, Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition, is also available for free.
2. Mobile Commerce
NopCommerce provides many well-designed responsive templates that scale correctly and content optimization for all kinds of devices and browsers. Thus, your eCommerce website can go mobile in a short time and without any additional development or add-ons.
In 2017, Mobile commerce sales were around 58.9% of all digital sales, a total of $1.357 trillion. Mobile commerce can take center stage by 2021 with an expected 72.9 % of all online sales, a total of $3.556 trillion.
3. Streamlined Payment Process
NopCommerce provides a smooth payment process designed by keeping in mind the bounce rate during checkout. In addition, the payment process is customizable and helps a retailer improve conversion rates by offering the best user experience to customers.
Take a look at the default checkout and payment methods:
- Accepts major credit and debit cards
- Supports refunds and partial refunds.
- Supports 50+ payment gateways like Amazon PayPal,
- CC Avenue, PayU, etc.
- Supports Cash on Delivery.
- Helps One-page checkout to reduce the steps and make the checkout easier for customers.
- Supports Multilingual & Multicurrency.
- Provides exclusive marketing offers and pricing packages for significant payment processors worldwide.
- Supports SSL (secure browsing and checkout) and PDF order receipts.
4. Search Engine Friendly
NopCommerce has comprehensive SEO features. It provides a store owner complete access to keyword tags, Sitemap, customized URLs, etc.
The default SEO tool of nopCommerce offers:
- Keyword tagging
- XML and HTML sitemap support
- URL canonicalization
- Google Analytics integration
- URLs customization and Management
- Microdata (rich snippets)
- Breadcrumb navigation
- URL localization
5. Marketing Features
Marketing is essential in both online and offline businesses. NopCommerce platform is in-built with a wide array of advanced marketing features. It allows the merchant to connect with new customers and retain the old ones too. The top nopCommerce development companies help in achieving this.
The marketing features offered in nopCommerce include:
- Reward Points System
- Content, News & Blog Pages
- Discounts and coupons
- Product comparison
- Gift cards
- Newsletter subscriptions
- Related products for up-selling
- Product reviews and ratings
- Affiliate program
6. Multi-vendor Support along with Drop-shipping
If you want to launch a successful e-store in the market like Amazon, Flipkart, or eBay, multi-vendor and drop-ship features are a must. It allows you to sell online without any stock inventory or ship order management.
By enabling this feature, once an order is placed, the respective vendor gets an order email. In addition, the vendor can be provided an admin panel to manage their product and order shipments in the store. If you know digital marketing, it’s a high-profit option with a low investment.
The Pros of nopCommerce:
- It is open-source, free, and constantly updated to keep up with the latest technologies.
- Enjoys excellent community support that helps to improve the solution, develops extensions and themes, and assists other users.
- It contains all the essential features like Multi-Store, Multi-Vendor, and Multi-Warehouse.
- Has an incredible modular architecture, making it easy to customize for different kinds of needs.
The Cons of nopCommerce:
- It lacks many influential and powerful CMS features.
- It has a steep learning curve for coding.
- With time, it has a lower adaptation in the industry.
So, what should be your pick when thinking of nopCommerce vs. Prestashop?
After a detailed analysis of PrestaShop and nopCommerce features and their pros and cons, I have concluded that PrestaShop is comparatively better than nopCommerce in functionality and performance.
PrestaShop is easy to use; a non-technical person can quickly get started with it. However, whereas nopCommerce is free but fit for the only tech-savvy.
Take a look at the expert’s quality score given to both technologies.
PrestaShop
nopCommerce
In the above image, you can see PrestaShop leading with a 9.3 score, whereas nopCommerce has scored only 8.3. No doubt, nopCommerce’s score is good, but in the technical war of PrestaShop Vs. nopCommerce, PrestaShop wins.
I hope you have got the answer and made up your mind to go with PrestaShop. If yes, connect with the best PrestaShop development company in India today for further proceedings in your project.
Good Luck!
Also Read: Go vs. Rust: Which one to Pick for Web Development?
FAQs
Question: Is PrestaShop better than WordPress?
Answer: PrestaShop has a CMS section for customizing pages, but it has minimal features and only the classic editor for editing all aspects of pages. On the other hand, WordPress has both the Classic and Gutenberg editors for adding custom fields and editing more than just significant aspects of pages.
Running a store? Great! You need to manage lots of content, and WooCommerce is the way to go. Notably, WordPress has become one of the most popular blogging platforms on the web.
Question: Is PrestaShop better than OpenCart?
Answer: Both Prestashop and OpenCart are good choices, and they each have their own set of strengths and weaknesses. There isn’t a better solution because it depends on which factors are more important to you.
For example, while both products offer great flexibility in designing a custom theme, only Prestashop currently has a fully-supported mobile app out of the box (although it is being worked on).
If that feature matters to you, then Prestashop would be a better fit—but if you care about SEO support or community features like Facebook groups, OpenCart might be better for you.
Question: nopCommerce vs. Prestashop: Which one is easy to use?
Answer: Yes, nopCommerce is easy to use as it comes with a drag-and-drop interface that lets you create a website without writing code. It’s perfect if you’re new to building websites and want something quick and straightforward to get started with – but it doesn’t give you much control over how your site looks or works.
With Prestashop, on the other hand, you can tweak pretty much everything about how your site looks and feels – but that means it might take a little longer to learn than nopCommerce.
Do you want something straightforward and easy to use – or are you looking for something more professional that gives you complete control over how it looks and works?
If it’s just a hobby site, maybe going with nopCommerce would be best; if it’s an online shop or information-based website, it makes sense to go with Prestashop.
Question: nopCommerce vs Prestashop: Which one is preferred by brands?
Answer: First of all, what are we talking about? We are speaking about two open-source platforms that help you build an online marketplace with ease and as quickly as possible. Let’s look at both platforms in depth to see which one of them will be preferred by brands and why.
Both nopCommerce and Prestashop have a similar goal: to provide a simple way to create an online shop within minutes without coding experience or complex plugins & extensions.
Coming to the brand recognition of nopCommerce vs. Prestashop.
nopCommerce is used by the following brands
- Live Deftsoft Informatics Pvt. Ltd.,
- Collaborative Consulting
- University of California-Los Angeles
- Blackfriars Group
Prestashop, on the other hand, is used by the following brands:
- Search Engine Optimization, Inc.
- Federal Emergency Management Agency
- Confidential Records, Inc.
Image sources:
Go with nopCommerce.
Haha. Prestashop is way ahead of nopCommerce.
I am looking for an eCommerce development company but unable to decide between various CMSs. My main preference is to go with a CMS that is SEO-friendly. Please suggest which CMS would suit my requirement best.
I would choose nopCommere over Prestashop any day.