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As obvious as it might seem, this is the Internet, and people from all over the world will certainly visit your shop, and order your products. As a shop owner, you must cater for as many customers as possible. This means having your website fully translated in as many languages as necessary, with local taxes, weights and currency units, local geographical zones, etc.
The "Localization" tab appeared with PrestaShop 1.5, and brings together many local settings and tools that used to be scattered in other tabs in previous versions.
The main page under the "Localization" tab enables you to configure the units used for your products.
This section provides you with an extensive list of existing localization packs which you can import. Not only does it set your PrestaShop install with your proper local units, but it also adds many other data:
As you can see, these additional data are optional: you can choose to import the currency and language for a given country, and not its taxes, for instance.
While you should not add too many local data for fear of overwhelming both yourself and your customers with it, it may be useful to import the localization pack for your most visited countries (according to your stats).
Apart from the default units, you cannot automatically remove all the data for a given country; if you need to remove data, you will have to do so manually, in their respective pages under the "Localization" tab.
This section groups four default local settings, of prime importance:
The physical units presented in this section (weight, distance, volume, dimension) are used both in your product sheets, and for your own packaging needs – and ultimately, is essential in your relationship with your carrier.
These values can be set when you import the localization package for a country, but you can edit manually them afterwards. For instance, if you'd rather have centiliters instead of liters for the volume unit, change the default "L" to "cL".
The values should be unit symbols from the International System of Units (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units).
This last section asks you to set your server's local language and country, as ISO code:
These values can be set when you import the localization package for a country, but you can edit manually them afterwards.
PrestaShop comes multilingual out of the box: there are 5 default languages (English, French, Spanish, Deutsch and Italian), and many more are available to download.
The "Languages" page manages the languages you'll see in your back office and your shop.
The page displays the languages already installed on your shop, along with a few information: ISO code, language code, date format (short and full). You can enable or disable a language by clicking on the icon in the "Enabled" column.
Adding a new language is simply a question of important the localization pack from a country which uses that language (in the "Localization" page). If it turns out this does not work, or that you need something customized, you can add a new language manually, using the form behind the "Add new" button.
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Creating a new language means you will have to translate all of the text for PrestaShop's front-end, back-end, modules, etc., or risk using the default English strings. Translation is made using the tool in the "Translations" page, under the "Localization" tab. You can also create a new language in order to cater for a language pack that you would have downloaded from the PrestaShop site. |
In order to add a new language, you must fill as many of the form's field as possible:
xx-yy, xx being the language ISO code (same as above), and yy the country ISO code, using ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag for more information.date() function: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php.\img\l directory of your PrestaShop installation.Once your language is saved and enabled, you can import its language pack. This is done in the "Translations" page, under the "Localization" tab. Use the "Import a language pack manually" tool.
Finally, make sure everything works: go to your shop's front-office and click on the flags at the top. Similarly, customers can now select an additional language by using these icons.
PrestaShop's zones are a list of the world's subregions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subregion). It helps categorize countries.
If needed, you can create more zones: click on "Add New" to display the creation form.
All you need is a name and a status. The name is not public.
Your PrestaShop installation must know all existing countries in order for your customers to clearly indicate where in the world they live.
There are roughly 195 countries in the World, but PrestaShop has 244 registered. This is because some countries include overseas regions are part of the country proper. For instance, the French departments formerly known as DOM (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, Reunion, and French Guiana) nowadays have equals status as the French metropolitan region. Likewise, Alaska and Hawaii are US States proper.
Still, sending a package to Guadeloupe doesn't mean sending it to France, if only for the shipping fees. Therefore, the list of countries in PrestaShop actually separates the country from the mainland.
Be default, only your own country is enabled. You should enable them one by one, as needed for your customers. If unsure which to enable, check your stats to see the countries with most visitors.
At the bottom of the list, the "Country options" section makes it possible to have countries covered by your carriers on your appear on your front-office. We recommend you to enable that setting, as it prevents customers from having to scroll through all the country names to find their own.
Normally, PrestaShop comes with all current countries in the database. But in the scenario that new ones appear, you would need to add a new country.
By "States", PrestaShop calls first-level administrative divisions of a country. In the United-States, they are called states; in Italy, it's regioni (singular: regione); in France, it's régions; in the United-Kingdom, it's regions. By default, PrestaShop provides you with a set of states: the 50 US states, the 13 Canadian provinces and territories, 24 Argentinian provincias, and 110 Italian province (singular: provincia).
Having states properly defined in your database helps better represent the delivery possibilities of your carriers. It is therefore important to enter all of a given country's administrative divisions if they are important to your carriers. You can find a list of such divisions on this Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_administrative_divisions_by_country.
Note: the PrestaShop address form currently only lists states which are available for the customer to choose. Therefore, make sure to use a sensible list when adding content to your states list. That is the reason why, for instance, the list contains Italian province rather than regioni.
Let's create a new state. Click the "Add New" button to get to the creation form.
PrestaShop can accept a large number of currencies. By default, there are three standard currencies: The Euro, the US Dollar, and the British Pound. However, you must add and configure new currencies depending on your customers needs. Indeed, customers will appreciate the ability to display your shop's prices in their country's currency.
The two sections at the bottom of the "Currencies" page are very simple yet essential, as relate to your currencies exchange rates (or "conversion rates"). To quote Wikipedia, "In finance, an exchange rate between two currencies is the rate at which one currency will be exchanged for another. It is also regarded as the value of one country’s currency in terms of another currency." Rates change daily, sometimes drastically depending on current events, and your shop should always be updated to the latest values.
In PrestaShop, there are two ways to update your conversion rates:
crontab file in order to activate automatic update. If you do not know what a cron task or a crontab file is, contact your hosting provider.|
Note that the rates are provided as-is: the PrestaShop team does pay attention to have correct rates in these file, but might slightly differ from the actual ones, if only because these rates can fluctuate greatly in a short time. |
The easiest way to add a country's currency is to import its localization package. This is done in the "Localization" page, under the "Localization" tab. Once import, you must go the "Currencies" page to enable it.
You might need to add a currency not featured in any the localization packages. In that case, you can use the creation form.
Taxes are a complex subject, which should be fully understood as it can have a significant impact on your product prices or your shipping fees. While this user-guide is not meant to teach all the ins-and-outs of taxes, we will try our best give you pointers.
Taxes and tax rules vary considerably from one country to another, and even within a single country if it has federal states (USA, Germany, Spain, Russia...). XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
By default, a tax applies to all groups and countries/states/zones. If order to apply a specific tax rate for a single country or a set of countries (and not some others), you must create a tax rule.
A few sample taxes are already in place, which depend on the country you chose for your shop during the installation of PrestaShop. The tax rules are set for each tax: the rules actually serve as a kind of country filter, limiting the use of that tax to a specific set of countries.
You should edit a couple of the presented taxes in order to get a better grasp of how tax rules can be set.
You can of course add more tax rules to your PrestaShop installation. Not only that, but you should make sure that all of the needed tax rules are registered in your shop.
Note that the default rate applied to your product will be based on your store's default country.
The "Taxes" sub-tab, located under the "Payment" tab, enables you to manage the applicable taxes. Click on this tab to see the list of taxes. Three taxes are set up by default.
This sub-tab also gives you access to a set of options, which apply to the whole store and all of the orders.
If an ecotax does apply, a new field will appear in the product creation page:
If you decide to take the ecotax in consideration after having added products, you will have to edit them in order to set the tax properly for each product.
The ecotax will also appear to the customer, on the product's page:
When you want to add another tax; simply click on the "Add New" button seen in the previous screenshot, and this form will appear:
Fill in the name of the tax ("TVA", for example), and its rate (in the XX.XX format), and save.
Note: It is a good idea to add reminders within the name, such as the country/group/zone the tax applies to, and its rate; this can help remembering which tax is to be applied to a given product.
PrestaShop provides you with full translation tool for your shop. This helps you add and edit the current translations. This way, you are the master of your shop, and can handle your translated strings without having to wait for translators to publish their corrections.
Even if you do not want to correct the translators' work, you might want to change the wording they chose to use (less formal, less wordy, etc.), and customize the various available text, thus tailoring your website to your audience (for instance, a hip-hop clothing shop might be better off using expressions different from that of a luxury watches shop).
The "Translation" sub-tab provides a few tools for your translation needs.
Many languages are available for you to download and install, directly from the PrestaShop servers. Your PrestaShop install will take care of downloading the language pack, unpacking it and create the correct sub-folder in your installation's /translation folder.
You can also update the currently installed languages, likewise directly from the PrestaShop servers. But be reminded that any change that you might have made to a language pack will be lost if you update it.
In the case where you do not want to use an official PrestaShop translation pack, but rather a custom one (either provided by someone you know, or one that you exported from another PrestaShop install), then this form is for you. Select the Zip file, click the "Import" button, and it will install the pack in the /translation+ folder. Warning: if there already exists a language folder with the same ISO 639-1 code, it will be replaced by the files from the archive you are importing.
Either as a way of making a backup of your customizations, or of sharing them with other PrestaShop installs, you can create your own language pack using this form.
Note that the pack will contain the theme that your translation is supposed to support.
You can copy the content of one language to another. This is especially useful when you wish to replace a theme language with the same language from another theme.
The most important tool of the "Translation" sub-tab is in the "Modify translations" section. This is where you can choose to edit a translation, and completely customize each and every sentence if you wish.
Select the part of the current translation that you wish to edit:
A long form then appears. It contains, split in tens of section, the hundreds of available strings.
Click on a section title to open or close it, edit at will, and click on the "Update Translation" button at the top of the page when you are done.
At the right of each text field is an icon: