PrestaShop

Prestashop is an open source e-commerce store solution which is rich in features and has clean and sleek themes. More than 200,000 e-commerce stores are running on PrestaShop. Prestashop is easy to set up and you can download and install it on your web server. Out of the box, Prestashop comes with a responsive theme. Paid themes are available and unlike other e-commerce solutions, Prestashop has more elegant themes which will make your online store stand out. PrestaShop is no Magento, however, its feature set is sufficient for new online shop owners who are looking for a shopping cart which is easy to operate. As a marketplace owner, you will be spending a lot of time in the admin panel and its admin panel is intuitive and easy to master. The dashboard provides you will graphical analytical reports about your store and sales. You can customize themes, manage products, customers, orders, other users, modules, and reports by navigating through different tabbed options. Prestashop comes with 120 modules (plugins) which you can add to add more functionalities to your stores like loyalty or referral programs. Most of the popular payment gateways are supported out of the box as well. In order to use your local currency, you can download the localization packs. Apart from the store catalog, Prestashop also has CMS capabilities and you can add pages using a WYSIWYG system based on TinyMCE. Prestashop can be integrated with Wordpress, however, this requires an expert developer skills. You can display the WordPress content in-between columns full of PrestaShop content or your online store display links to your WordPress content. All this and more can be with a few well chosen WordPress plugins and PrestaShop modules.

The support is not free! Prestashop can be buggy at times and you will have to go through a lot of community stuff to resolves these issues. Like it will keep on logging users out while they are uploading new product. After a lot of searching, I found out an issue with cookies. Even though the platform is free, themes and modules can be expensive. This will surely bump up your operating cost. It definitely has a learning curve and will take some time before you can start using all of its features. Whenever you upgrade your store, you never know what problems it might run into.

Prestashop is one of the better e-commerce solutions out there for those who do not want to invest in turnkey solutions like Shopify. You can start low and if required, you can add on modules and hire a developer to add more functionalities to your site. However, over long run you will end up spending a lot on technical development than you bargained for. If you are looking for a more scalable solution then I would recommend going with Magento.