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Deactivating your shop means making sure that no one can access it while you are busy making changes, creating products, settings prices and taxes, installing payment modules and a new theme, setting carriers... This is called "putting your shop in maintenance mode".
In your back - office, go the "Preferences / Maintenance" page. This page features two simple settings:
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If you have already decided what your theme and products are, 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.
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Delete the content of the default shop
The default installation features a handful of products – mainly women's clothing. 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.
You must therefore delete all the default data, which means:
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This would mean browsing through the many various screens of the back - office and deleting content one page after the other, but there is much easier way:
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You should pay attention to the following settings, most of which are important because they are displayed on the front - office, and therefore in plain sight of your customers.
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Setting | Description | Where to find it |
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Shop name | Defines your brand, most notably on search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing...). | "Preferences" menu, "Store Contacts" page, then in the "Contact details" section, edit the "Shop name" option. |
Shop logo | Defines your brand visually. The default logo says "YourLogo" as an incentive to use yours. | "Preferences" menu, "Themes" page, "Appearance" section, then change the various default images to your logo. |
Default shop currency | The currency in which you want to set the default price for your products. | "Localization" menu, "Localization" page, "Configuration" section. |
Customer service info | A block presenting the phone number for your customer service, and a button to send you an e-mail. | "Contact block" module. |
Company info / | A block presenting your contact address, the phone number for your customer service, and a link to send you an e-mail. | "Block contact info" module. |
Advertising | A block presenting an image with a link to another site. | "Advertising block" module. |
Image slider | The slider presents several images, scrolling one after the other. It is a strong visual signature for your store and products. | "Image slider for your homepage" module. |
CMS pages | The content of static pages, such as "About Us", "Delivery", "Legal Notice", "Terms and Conditions", and "Secure Payment". Some of them have default content, which you should adapt to your business; some others are empty, and you should paste your own text. | "Preferences" menu, "CMS" page, then edit and create pages at will. |
| Social networks | A block presenting three links: your company's Facebook page, your company's Twitter account, and the RSS feed for your company's blog (or "current events" site). | "Social networking block" module. |
| Top menu | The top of the default theme uses a top menu to indicate categories that the visitor can go to, as well as links to other locations – for instance, the default installation has a "Blog" link which sends the use to the official PrestaShop blog. | "Top horizontal menu" module. |
| Homepage content | The default theme contains a lot of demo content: texts, images, links, etc. If you intend on using that theme for your own store instead of buying your theme, you should make sure to remove all the default content first. | "Theme configurator" module: this module handles a lot of things on your theme. Mainly, it enables you to switch some feature off and on (social sharing buttons, top banner, payment logos, etc.), and perhaps more importantly, it lets you easily add/change images on your home-page. "Custom CMS information block" module: this module helps you manager the two last blocks at the bottom of the home-page, right before the footer: the "Free shipping etc." one and the "Custom block" one. |
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PrestaShop is able to work with many languages, both on the front - office and the back - office. Each back-office As soon as more than one language is enabled in your back office, each back office text-field is accompanied with a language code selector, which indicates the current language, and which you can click in order to choose another language in which to write that field's content.
By default, PrestaShop is installed with two languages: the one used when installing the software, and French. To manage the currently installed languages, go to the "Localization / Languages" page. It presents you with a table of the available languages.
The currently enabled language(s) have a green "Yes", while the others have a red "No". Click on a "Yes" to disable the selected language; click on a "No" to enable it back.
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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.
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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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