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First steps with PrestaShop 1.6
You must spend a good amount of time making sure every part of your future online shop is properly set up, secured, validated and ready for business.
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PrestaShop is a very complete tool, and the number of possibilities can feel overwhelming. This chapter will therefore lead you through some basic actions to perform in order to set up your shop before the big launch. A lot can and must be done before you launch your shop, but these steps are the essential configuration steps of any shop.
Deactivate your shop
We will consider that you are still within the first hour following your installation of PrestaShop, in a single-shop instance.
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If you are already decided on your theme and products, you can simply put your shop in Catalog mode. This means that customers can browse your shop, but no price will be displayed, and they won't be able to add anything to their cart until you disable the Catalog mode. You can activate the Catalog mode by going to the "Preferences / Products" page, where it is the first option. |
Delete the content of the default shop
The default installation features a handful of products – mainly Apple products, along with a couple of third-party accessories. Their only use is to help you explore the organization of a real store. After you've learned the intricacies of the ties between products, categories, orders and customers, you should delete all these items in order to start your shop with a clean slate.
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The iPod Touch from the default installation is tied to the sample order (made by sample customer John Doe), and thus cannot be deleted until the order is deleted. Therefore, in order to delete this product, you first need to delete this sample order. To safely delete the default order (and thus be able to delete the iPod from your catalog), install the "PrestaShop cleaner" module (see above), open its configuration screen and check the "Delete Orders & Customers" button. |
Configure your shop's information
Now that you have a clean shop, you can start making it your own, and that implies setting everything up to your likings, starting with your personal information and your preferences.
The shop's basic settings
You should pay attention to the following settings, most of which are important because they are displayed on the front-office.
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These are the most visible default settings on your front-end – at least with the default theme.
The "Where to find it" column enables you to see where you can find the interface to change these aspects of your store. This user guide will provide you with more details for each interface.
Shop languages
PrestaShop is able to work with many languages, both on the front-office and the back-office. Each back-office text-field is accompanied with a flag icon, which indicates the current language, and which you can click in order to choose another language in which to write that field's content.
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You can easily import many more languages in the "Localization / Localization" page, and then enable them in the "Localization / Languages" page.
Employees information
Should you have people helping you with your shop (whether they are your family, your friends or paid employees), you should make sure to create an employee account for each of them – if only to know has performed which recent action. The other advantage is that you can give them specific profiles and specific access rights to the administration pages: for instance, you might not want everyone to have access to your statistics, your invoices or your payment settings.
You can create as many profiles as needed.
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Now that you have a proper account for this employee, you should give that account specific permissions, tailored to the employee's tasks. By default, a new profile cannot do much. It is up to you to set exactly the parts of your shop to which that profile should have access. It can be a tedious task, but it is an important one.
To assign permissions to an employee account, you must use the "Profile" option in the account creation page: this menu lets you pick the account's profile (SuperAdmin, translator, etc.)
You can edit these permissions this way: go to the "Administration" menu, select "Permissions", and select the profile you want to change. A long list of permissions appears: edit them at will. Your changes are saved automatically.
Configure your payment methods
Your shop is meant to earn money, and this can only become a reality if you use at least one payment module. Several modules are already available in the default install, which you can install and configure (from the "Modules" page under the "Module" menu, in the "Payments & Gateways" category), and create restrictions for them (in the "Payments & Gateways" page under the "Modules" menu). Many payment modules require you to first set up an account on the service they were built for.
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Check and bank wire are the only two payment methods which are enabled by default. If you choose to keep them, you need to configure them with your information: check order and address, account owner, bank details (IBAN, BIC, etc.). These payment methods are configured through the "Bank Wire" and "Check" modules, which you can find in the "Payments & Gateways" category of the modules list. |
Configure carriers and shipment
Products sold on your shop must be shipped to your customers – unless you only sell downloadable products, in which case the "Shipping" menu will be of little use to you.
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Merchandise return is not enabled by default. If you want to allow your customers to return products and get a refund or a voucher, you can do it in the "Merchandise return (RMA) options" of the "Merchandise return" page, under the "Orders" menu. |
Choose your theme
Your shop should have its own theme in order to have a distinctive style, and therefore be more recognizable, separating it from the numerous other online shops.
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You can and should customize some of the theme's aspects, most notably its logo in various situations (header, mail, invoice, etc.). This is done using the "Themes" preferences page, which you can find under the "Preferences" menu.
Choose your modules
PrestaShop comes bundled with more than a hundred modules. These are very varied: analytics, front-office features, payment, shipping... You should explore the available modules in full, in order to know which ones you might want to enable, and which you'd rather keep disabled.
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Every time you activate and configure a module, make sure that it does work well within the confines of your theme, in case its features impact your shop's front-end. |
Create your products and product categories
This is described in details in the "Adding Products and Product Categories" chapter.
Create your static content
If you haven't done this already, you should take the time to write the content for the various static pages which are either already available in your PrestaShop installation, or ones that you feel are needed.
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You can create as many pages as you feel are necessary.
Build your top menu
Now that you have product categories and CMS pages, you should arrange them in a logical and compelling way in the top menu.
This is done using the "Top horizontal menu" module: go to the "Modules" page, type "menu" in the module search form, and you should find the module. Enable it if it is disabled, then configure it: remove the pages or categories you deem unnecessary, add other pages, and move the content around, until you are satisfied with your menu's hierarchy.
Activate your shop
Now that all is set and done, you can finally open your shop to the public.
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