Each eCommerce platform has a distinctive influence on your business performance on e-marketplaces. That’s why you should prefer a proper website to enhance your brand’s identity from scratch. If so, which one of PrestaShop vs Shopify will be better for you to run a new store? Our blog will help you find an optimal solution to this concern.
In this article, we will cover 2 main parts, including:
- A quick summary of PrestaShop vs Shopify
- Detailed comparison of Shopify vs PrestaShop
Right now, let’s take a look at our comparison of both these platforms below!
PrestaShop vs Shopify: Quick Summary
Shopify vs PrestaShop are known as top eCommerce platforms, offering users various wonderful features to promote their online businesses. However, any website will have both negative and positive impacts on your store. Below are some of our evaluations about the pros and cons of these platforms.
Pros and cons of PrestaShop
PrestaShop is a free, open-source CMS (content management system) that helps business owners expand their stores' scale easily. Before building a new store on PrestaShop, you should consider some of PrestaShop pros and cons to attain an optimal option for your brand.
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Pros and cons of Shopify
Shopify official website display
Shopify is a fully-hosted platform that delivers a broad range of eCommerce features to your online store. To help you to have an overall evaluation of Shopify, we have just listed basic Shopify pros and cons when operating your brand’s eCommerce purposes.
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Basically, Shopify and PrestaShop are top-prioritized solutions for you to run your online store with a lot of outstanding features. Some famous brands have been using PrestaShop to manage their sites, like Surf Inc., Huygens or Bleu De Chauffe. For Shopify, you can view store examples in Gymshark, Allbirds, or KITH. We think that all of these sites are well-structured, as well as have impressive loading speeds.
If you find it difficult to develop a PrestaShop store due to some strict technical requirements, we recommend you try Shopify as an ideal alternative. If so, you can refer to Shopify Migration to build a new store from PrestaShop’s data available. LitExtension, #1 Shopping Cart Migration Expert - our long-time and reputable partner will help you to smoothly migrate from PrestaShop to Shopify.
PrestaShop vs Shopify: Detailed Comparison
We will compare PrestaShop vs Shopify in some important concerns. They include ease of use; themes & templates; apps & extensions; eCommerce features; pricing plans; marketing & SEO; security and support. From that, you can easily opt for an ideal solution for your online business.
1. Ease of Use
For beginners, Shopify is considered the ideal tool, instructing you to build your new website from start to end. With a suitable package, you can easily customize anything on Shopify pages through clear guides from the Shopify Dashboard. Thus, users can handily edit your site’s content without using codes only with simple steps.
On the contrary, PrestaShop is developed in the PHP language, which is preferred to run on Windows, Unix, or Linux systems. That’s why PrestaShop is highly recommended for anyone who used to get familiar with some coding know-how. You should follow its detailed guide to first set up a site structure and add some necessary coding installation to make your site more functional.
Codes from PHP language on PrestaShop
In short, we consider that it is relatively more challenging to adjust and run a store on PrestaShop than Shopify.
2. Themes & Template
Users can approach a large section of fully responsive Shopify page templates, which are developed by various professionally designed teams in the world. Some of Shopify templates are designed by PageFly - one of the most popular website builders. Thus, you can easily catch impressively-featured themes in PageFly Templates to promote a well-structured store for your Shopify business.
Available templates on Shopify themes
In case you prefer any innovative ideas for systematic themes, let’s try Shopify Liquid. It is a smart solution allowing users to edit your site’s underlying code, helping you to own different designs to match your demands.
PrestaShop also delivers various themes to customize for your online store, including fee and non-fee items. With PrestaShop Marketplace, you can freely select any templates from 15 categories available to optimize your product style on the website. To experience more themes, you can register a new package for $59.99. Don’t forget to learn how to modify the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file in the PrestaShop theme to optimize your site’s structure.
Available templates on PrestaShop themes
Basically, PrestaShop vs Shopify can offer business owners plenty of themes and templates. Thus, it is not easy to determine which platform is more outstanding in this concern.
3. PrestaShop or Shopify: Apps & Extensions
Both PrestaShop’s marketplace and Shopify’s app store provide users with a large collection of app and extension choices. However, most applications on Shopify are well-structured, helping you easily integrate and optimize their functions while running your store. By contrast, some apps or modules on PrestaShop require special customizations, and somehow are challenging to catch how to use. Thus, we consider Shopify to be a better option to run apps and extensions in your store.
Common apps on Shopify app store
4. Shopify vs PrestaShop: eCommerce features
If you are running a store on a website, it is important to take a look eCommerce features both platforms offer. In this case, we will compare Shopify vs PrestaShop in 3 main concerns, including payment, dropshipping, and inventory management.
Inventory management
Shopify offers you powerful features to optimize your store’s inventory activities, including:
- Track the status of storage
- View inventory histories
- Add and remove products
- Modify inventory quantities
Besides that, each inventory-relating object in Shopify is always well-organized. Thus, owners can seamlessly navigate relevant sections. If you want to optimize your Shopify product updates, you can attain that with tons of available storefronts.
Similarly, PrestaShop is also packed with a broad range of features to enhance inventory management’s efficiency, such as:
- Analyze sales and stock level
- Sync with third-party systems
- Restock inventory smartly (using a PrestaShop inventory import sample)
- Update stock with supplier
Basic modules to manage inventory on PrestaShop
With these features, PrestaShop is considered as a wonderful solution, helping you easily control and take care of all brand products.
Dropshipping
Dropshipping has recently become a trendy method, allowing e-merchants to exchange products with suppliers without considering order fulfillment. This section will take a clear look at the dropshipping features from PrestaShop to Shopify.
To complete the dropshipping process on PrestaShop, you need to add a dropshipping PrestaShop module and integrate it with the PrestaShop system. After that, let’s select the proper products to start dropshipping on this platform.
Not using an available module like the PrestaShop dropship module, Shopify doesn’t come with built-in features to drop ship products. You’ll need to install a third party app to start a Shopify dropshipping store.
A basic cycle to run dropshipping on Shopify
Payment
When experiencing the payment system on Shopify, you can use multi-currency to make deals and up to 100+ worldwide payment gateways to complete your transactions. Additionally, Shopify also hasa variety of supported payments, such as Buy Now, Pay Later with Shop Pay, Accelerated checkout button, Credit and Debit cards, COD, etc.
Common payment gateways on Shopify
With PrestaShop, you have 2 main options to make any payments, including using a third-party processor or a PrestaShop Checkout solution. To ensure your transaction is successful, you must follow PrestaShop policies, especially GDPR.
From that, it is hard to select the better option between PrestaShop vs Shopify when comparing eCommerce features. All thing you need to do is to adopt these features on each platform flexibly to gain the best values for your store.
In case you are running a high volume of products and have a demand to expand your business’s scale, you can try Shopify Plus. This package offers store owners various outstanding features such as unlimited staff accounts, additional themes, specialized eCommerce apps, and so forth. If you want to attain these functions, we recommend you have Shop Plus Migration for your store to save time and get the best store display.
5. Shopify or PrestaShop: Pricing plans
If you wonder Is prestashop free?", PrestaShop doesn't cost you any installation fee, however, you need to pay for a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) or a hosting provider. Therefore, you should cover the price of the hosting provider’s services when estimating your budget to run your store on this platform. To promote your store’s accessibility, we also recommend you have flexible integration with PrestaShop add-ons.
Hosting provider's policies on PrestaShop
On the other hand, there are 3 common Shopify plans, ranging from $39 to $399 monthly. In particular:
- Basic Shopify: $39/month
- Shopify: $105/month
- Advanced Shopify: $399/month
Unfortunately, users can’t approach a free pricing plan and only have a 3-day free trial to customize their Shopify store. However, you can get an ideal payment of only $1/month when you register for the next 3 months. It is great for you to save your budget and test your Shopify store for the early stage of business. You should also consider unexpected costs relating to orders or shipping. If so, don’t miss our instructions on the Shopify pricing caculator to optimize your financial distribution.
Official Shopify basic pricing plans
In short, when comparing PrestaShop to Shopify pricing plan, PrestaShop somehow is more costly than Shopify due to rising fees from hosting providers and additional templates.
6. Marketing & SEO
PrestaShop vs Shopify equally offer powerful tools to optimize SEO ranking for your store website. With Shopify’s marketing dashboard, you can use impressive in-built functions, such as image alt text, meta description, meta title, and so on. Regarding PrestaShop SEO, you need to install marketing modules to start creating coupons, cross-selling, price rules, and similar plans to enhance your brand’s identity effectively.
Outstanding modules on PrestaShop
From that, Shopify is more ideal than PrestaShop to run SEO features for your eCommerce store. Without installing additional modules, you still easily engage your site’s traffic naturally from available tools on Shopify. It will be surely a wonderful experience for users.
7. Security and support
Shopify can impress any user with high-quality services, depending on your pricing plan. However, 24/7 support through live chat and email is availableto help with any option. Additionally, users can enter a large Shopify community to get references from experts or experienced operators to address unexpected incidents quickly.
Register to join Shopify Community
Unlike Shopify, PrestaShop only offers 2 main support services, including Presta Technical Assistance and Presta Online Assistance. For the former option, merchants need to pay from $300 to $900 to get extensive help from experts. Nevertheless, your store is at normal risk, so let’s take free guides and tutorials from PrestaShop Online Assistance. It can help you to save a lot of money.
Basically, both PrestaShop vs Shopify are good solutions when it comes to customer care policies. However, we think that Shopify is a smarter option if you don’t want to pay for the expanded consultants.
Extensive customer services from PrestaShop
Regarding security concerns, while Shopify holds an SSL registration certificate - recognized at Level 1, PrestaShop strictly follows PCI-compliant. Both standards are highly evaluated when creating a strong protection wall for users’ business data. However, we consider that Shopify is still a better option in this situation. It is simply because while PrestaShop costs you a fee to get useful support for security problems, Shopify hardly requires this payment.
With our detailed comparisons of the 7 features above, we believe that you have a deeper understanding of both Shopify and PrestaShop. If you are a non-techie, Shopify is an ideal solution to adopt for your store. By contrast, PrestaShop is highly recommended for users who are familiar with some tech skills to customize your store’s structure easily.
Final Words
Our blog has just provided you with detailed evaluations of PrestaShop vs Shopify. Whichever option you use, let’s remember that optimizing business values is the most important factor you should consider to run any feature on your store. If you want to experience a user-friendly platform, Shopify is a good solution to adopt. However, you should not miss PrestaShop's assistance in accessing more themes and inventory-management modules.
Explore more, check out: Shopify vs Your Own Website: Which One to Invest in 2024?
