In the last blogposts we focused on the complex and articulated world of e-commerce platforms: to continue to give you useful information on this issue, today we analyze the differences between two CMS of different nature, Shopify and PrestaShop.
The first offers a ready-to-use platform at the cost of a monthly or annual subscription; the second, instead, is an open-source product and downloadable for free (however, other types of costs, not foreseen by Shopify, such as maintenance and updating of the online store, must be calculated).
PrestaShop and Spotify: Costs
Shopify, as anticipated, offers the use of the platform at the cost of a subscription (we talked about Shopify’s prices and subscriptions in this article), to which must be added an additional costs for the purchase of a template (which usually amounts to between $100 and $180) and for the installation of any plugins for the management of additional functions (these can also be offered through the payment of a subscription or a simple purchase).
PrestaShop, on the other hand, does not require expenses related to the use of the platform; however, those who choose this product will have to think about costs related to installation, maintenance and management. Specifically, for example, to use this CMS it will be necessary to buy a domain and a hosting that host the store and that are set correctly so that the e-commerce works at its best.
Especially, if you have to manage a large e-commerce it will be better to rely on a good hosting service, at higher costs. These activities, in most cases, require the help of an experienced developer, who knows how to set the parameters of the site, change the code and guide us in the choice of plugins that can be useful to our e-commerce. In addition, the management of PrestaShop requires upgrade and maintenance costs that should not be addressed by Shopify users.
The Shopify subscription cover all the maintenance activities of the site, offering extensive support both from the technical point, and through useful guides to guide you in all the activities and tools related to the management of your e-commerce; among these, for example, the Shopify Academy, a section of Shopify where you can find free courses.
Receiving support for the management of PrestaShop, however, is more complicated. Being a free tool there is no real support from a dedicated team; However, you can find extensive documentation within the Prestashop Community Forum to address issues or consult the most known doubts regarding the use and management of the platform.
Graphic Customizations
In terms of the freedom to customize your site, both graphic customizations and function (technical), both platforms are excellent choices that offer the possibility of modifying the template and the choice of functions to use, through dedicated settings or plugins (free and paid).
In this sense we can say that, considering the cost of more code-side modifications, Prestashop offer more freedom.
On a graphic level, although both have a good number of templates to select, Prestashop seems to cover a wider choice; on the other hand, Shopify offers a greater ease of editing the template, through more usable customization tools.
Technical Differences
If we focus on the technical functions of the two CMS, we can say that both perform very well the fundamental activities of an e-commerce, such as, the ability to include a wide range of products, the tracking of an inventory, the management of the shipping activities and the possibility of management for the “abandoned cart” tool.
Also on the SEO side, both products offer the possibility to carry out some important activities, such as the management of metadata, the Page Url customization, the management of images and the relative alt tags for the insertion of the descriptions.
One of the strengths of Shopify is definitely the ability to use a large number of payment gateways to cover a large number of currencies, especially useful to sellers who want to sell around the world.
Performance that PrestaShop can match only through the purchase of certain plugins, whose price, for these functions, is variable and depends on the type of tool you want to install.
At this link you can find a list of plugins for installing and managing payment tools https://addons.prestashop.com/it/481-payment.
In contrast, one of the strengths of PrestaShop is the ability to, without having to install additional plugins paid or free, create and organize high-level multistore, with the ability to manage multiple stores connected to each other, and to modify them simultaneously (in case they share the same products), with wide benefits in terms of time and costs. To date this function does not seem to be so developed on Shopify: at the moment, however, to be used requires a third-party plugin.
It is also good to remember that part of the functions used by Shopify also depends on the subscription chosen.
For example, some activities such as the possibility of receiving detailed reports on user behaviour are only available with certain more expensive types of subscriptions.
In addition, even using the highest subscription, a limit of Shopify still remains the limited number of accounts to be associated with a single e-commerce; unlike PrestaShop that, in addition to not having an account limit for the management of an e-commerce, offers very wide possibilities of profiling.
Last but not least, we remind you that both CMS offer the possibility to expand the functions of their stores through the use of third-party plugins, which can be installed on their e-commerce, both free and paid.
Conclusions
The choice on which e-commerce is better to adopt depends on the nature of your company and the resources that you have available. We do not refer only to economic resources, but also to the size and skills of your work team, especially if the choice is more likely to use a tool like PrestaShop.
This CMS, compared to Shopify, definitely requires more skills in terms of development and maintenance, and, used correctly, could be a valid tool to differentiate itself from its competitors, especially if in the future you intend to create a multistore with shops run by different teams.
All this, however, provided you have a good technical team to rely on: a wrong choice in this sense, in fact, could cost a lot in terms of time and resources over the long term.
Conversely, if you do not want to rely on a development team, or if you need to use a valid tool that is able to represent us internationally without the need for this has too specific customizations, Shopify is an excellent alternative.
It must however be considered that even if the activities required by this CMS are not all difficult, for certain operations the support of an expert might be necessary; however with times and costs much smaller than those required by a development of an e-commerce created with PrestaShop.
If you are interested in the subject but neither of the two CMS satisfies you or you want to learn more about it, you can read the other articles regarding the comparison between the various e-commerce platforms.
Sources:
https://ecommerce-platforms.com/compare/prestashop-vs-shopify
https://www.prestashop.com/forums/forum/57-forum-italiano/
https://it.shopify.com/prezzi
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/small-business/prestashop-vs-shopify
