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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.
Appeared with PrestaShop 1.5, the "Localization" tab 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 respectives pages under the "Localization" tab.
This section groups four default local settings, of prime importance:
This last section asks you to set your server's local language and country, in ISO code:
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 "Language" tab manages the languages you'll see in your back office and your shop. When you click on this tab the page below is displayed.
This screen displays the languages already installed on your shop. You can enable or disable a language by clicking on the icon in the "Enables" column.
In the "Language options" section, you can select which language will be displayed by default, both in the back office and the front office.
If you want to add a language to your store, click the “Add New” to reach the form below.
In order to add a new language:
You can click on the flags at the top of your shop (front-office) to verify this operation. Similarly, visitors to your shop can now select an additional language by using the icons at the top of the page.
PrestaShop's zones are a list of the world's subregions. It helps categorize countries.
If needed, you can create more zones, by clicking, as usual, on "Add New".
All you need is a name and a status.
PrestaShop must know all existing countries in order for customers to clearly indicate their own.
At the bottom of the page, you can set the default country for your shop.
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. Click "Add New" to do so.
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 (regions); 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.
Note: the PrestaShop address form currently only lists states 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 "Add New" to get to the creation form.
PrestaShop can accept a large number of currencies. By default, there are three standard currencies: The Euro, the Dollar, and the Pound. However, you can add and configure new currencies by clicking on the "Currencies" sub-tab, under the "Payment" tab.
Click on "Add New" to create a new currency and fill out the form (see the next page).
The two last sections of the "Currencies" sub-tab are very simple:
When you want to add another currency, simply click on the "Add New" button seen in the previous screenshot, and this form will appear:
Once the new currency is added, click "Save" to save your settings
Be default, a tax applies to all groups and countries/states/zones. If you wish to apply a particular tax to a country or set of countries (and not some others), you must create a tax rule for it. To that end, go to the "Tax Rules" sub-tab.
A few sample tax rules are already in place, which you can edit to get a better grasp of how things work. Let's create a new tax rule altogether. Click on "Add New".
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: