Table of content
Now that you have installed PrestaShop and that your are properly logged-in to your administration area, 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.
While PrestaShop makes it easy for you to install it and build you business online, it cannot possibly be 5-seconds work: you are dealing with products, customers, and most importantly with real actual money that will be flowing from your customers to your bank account. We dare say you want to make sure nothing fails in the process of validating an order, have the products be found on your storage location, packaged, and shipped to your customers without a single glitch, or even without anything unpredicted happening without your knowledge.
We have created this chapter in order to help you make the best of your discovery of PrestaShop. Follow its directions to the letter, but be aware that you should read the whole guide in order to get a perfect grasp of your new online business tool!
Take the time to survey the Dashboard – that is, the first page you see when logging into your back-office. Not only does it present you with a summary of everything you need to know about your shop at any given time, along with quick links to the main action page, but as a first-timer in PrestaShop, it also gives you tips about what you should have a look at.
At the top of the back-office is a black containing a handful of links:
All along your daily activities administrating your shop, you will have to browser through the many pages and options of the back-office. Each tab applies to a given set of tasks:
These are the default tabs. Note that modules can add new tabs, add new pages to the existing tabs, and even new options to the existing pages.
Also, a new tab can be made available through the Preferences/Products tab: activating the "Enable advanced stock management" option (in the "Products stock" section) gives you access to a whole new feature of PrestaShop 1.5, where you can handle warehouses, stock movement and supply orders. Once activated, the new "Stock" tab appears on the right of the tab-bar, and you can use it as easily as the other standard tabs.
Each of the default standard tabs (along with the "Stock" tab) are explained in depth in this user guide.
Let's now explore the content of the Dashboard itself. It can feel crowded to first-time user, but you will find it gives an excellent summary your shop's daily at a glance.
The first element on the left is the introduction video and text. As a first-comer, we strongly advise you to watch the video, as it will serve as a quick visual guide to necessary steps to go through before opening your shop. We'll go into more details in the "Preparing your shop" section below. Once you have viewed the video, you can free some Dashboard real-estate by ticking the "Do not show again" checkbox.
Below the introductory video and text are a handful of quick links, which lead some of the most useful pages at this stage of your exploration of PrestaShop. These buttons should help you get going with your daily task quicker, as they are some of the most accessed features of PrestaShop.
Two partners banners close the section.
The left column ends with 4 boxes, two giving you information, the other two being links to external content.
The most interesting box at this stage is the "Configuration checklist" box, which displays seven key settings that should be taken care of for a healthy shop, written in color which indicates their status: green for "OK", yellow/orange for "advices", red for "must be done". We will explore this box in details in the "Preparing your shop" section below.
The "PrestaShop Links" box gives you useful links to this very user guide (online edition), its paper edition and the documentation site itself, along with links to the community forums and the Addons website, where you will be able to buy and sell modules and themes.
The "PrestaShop News" box gives you the latest news about PrestaShop, from the official blog.
Finally, a box is dedicated to a message from our partners.
The right column is where the term "dashboard" takes its importance: this side of the Dashboard presents the user with the most important numbers pertaining to his shop's daily activities, along with a graph of sales and a list of the latest orders. Every time you log into your shop's administration area, you will be first and foremost looking at the evolution these numbers take. This is where you see your shop live and breathe.
You are now getting a pretty good idea of how complete PrestaShop can be, and the number of possibilities can feel overwhelming. This first guide will therefore lead you through some basic actions to set up your shop before the big launch. A lot can be done before you launch your shop, but these steps are the essential configuration steps of any shop.
We'll consider that you are still within the first hour following your installation of PrestaShop, in a single-shop instance.
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 options:
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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. |
The default installation features a handful of products – mainly Apple products, along with a couple third-party accessories. Their only use is to help you explore the set up of a functional 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:
The means browsing through the many various screens of the back-office and deleting content one page after the other.
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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. To delete it, you first need to delete this sample order. |
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While deleting all this data takes only a handful of minutes, you might prefer to not have to do it at all. In this case, you can install your shop again and choose not to install the sample data during the installation process: simply relaunch the installer, and in the "Shop Configuration" screen, choose "No" for the "Install demo products" option. ONLY DO THIS IF YOU HAVEN'T CUSTOMIZED ANYTHING YET. Note that you will also lose some useful content, such as all the modules, the default theme, as well as the default contacts and administration profiles, which you will have to recreate by yourself. In short: you'd be better off deleting the sample content by hand. |
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.
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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Configuring a module is easy:
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Setting |
Description |
Menu / option |
|---|---|---|
Shop name |
Defines your brand, most notably on search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing...). |
"Shops" menu, "Shops" option, then click the shop name. |
Shop logo |
Defines your brand, visually and on your invoices. |
"Preferences" menu, "Themes" option, "Appearance" section, then change the various default images to your logo. |
Customer service info |
Displayed in the front-office, right column. |
"Block contact" module. |
Contact info |
Displayed in the front-office, footer. |
"Block contact infos" module. |
Advertising |
Image displayed in front-end |
"Block advertising" module. |
Image slider |
A slider usually placed front and center of the homepage, and therefore a visual signature for your shop 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 update; some others are empty, and you should paste your own text. |
"Preferences" menu, "CMS" options, then edit each page at will. |
These are the most visible default settings on your front-end.
PrestaShop is able to work with many languages, both on the front-office and the back-office. Each 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.
By default, PrestaShop is only installed with one language: English. You can easily enable more languages: open the "Localization" menu, choose the "Languages" item, and the page opens, with a table of all 5 available languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian. The currently enabled language(s) have green check mark, while the others have a red "X". Click on any of the red "X" in order to enable its language.
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You can enable as many languages as you feel your shop needs, but be aware that this will means that you will have to create content for all of the available languages: product name, description, tags; category name and description; static content (CMS pages); etc. |
Only 5 languages are available by default. You can add more if you need. Find out how in the "Managing Localization" chapter.
Should you have people helping you with your shop, be they your spouse, friends or paid employees, you should make sure to create an employee account for each of them, if only to know who is responsible for which 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.
To create a new employee profile, go to the "Employees" menu, select "Profiles", and click the "Add new" button. Fill in a name, such as "Shipping handler", and save.
Now that you have a proper account, you should give it specific permissions, tailored to the profile's activity. A profile can be used for as many employees as needed.
To assign permissions to an employee profile, go to the "Employees" menu, select "Permissions", and select the profile you just created. A long list of permissions appear. By default, a new profile cannot do much. It is up to you to set exactly the parts of your shop which that employee profile should have access to. It can be a tedious task, but it is an important.
To create an employee account, go to the "Employees" menu, select "Employees", and click the "Add new" button. Fill in the details, and do not forget to select the employee profile at the bottom. Once done, click the "Save" button.
Your shop is meant to earn money, and this can only become a reality if you use at least one payment module. 13 modules are already available in the default install, which you can install and configure (from the "Modules" page, "Payments & Gateways"). Many payment modules require you to first set up an account on the service they were built for.
See the "Managing Payment Methods" chapter of this guide in order to learn about them all.
You can also install other payment modules, downloaded from the Addons marketplace: http://addons.prestashop.com/en/4-payments-gateways
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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 or the modules list. |
Products sold on your shop must be shipped to your customers – unless you only sell downloadable products, in which case the "Shipping" tab will be of little use to you.
Whether you are sending your products yourself by mail, or you have set up a contract with a carrier, you should set these information within PrestaShop.
See the "Managing Shipping" chapter of this guide in order to learn about shipping and carriers.
Note: 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" tab.
Merchandise return is explained in the "Managing Orders" chapter of this guide.
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 shops online.
There are many themes to choose from on the PrestaShop Addons marketplace: http://addons.prestashop.com/en/3-templates-prestashop
You can also choose to create your own theme, or have it created for you by a developer. Refer to the online Designer Guide for help, at http://doc.prestashop.com/
Once your theme is installed, you should explore it fully in order to know it by heart and be able to help customers out of a situation.
You can and should customize some of the theme's aspects, most notably its logo in various situations (header, mail, invoice). This is done using the "Themes" preferences page, which you can find under the "Preferences" tab.
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.
See the "Managing Modules" chapter of this guide in order to learn about them all.
You can also install other payment modules, downloaded from the Addons marketplace: http://addons.prestashop.com/en/2-modules-prestashop
Every time you activate and configure a module, make sure that it does work well within the confines of your theme, if its features impact your shop's front-end.
This is described in details in the next chapter, "Adding Products and Product Categories".
If you haven't done this already, you should take the time to write the content for the various CMS that are either already present in the PrestaShop, or that you feel should be created.
Some page already exist, but their content should really be triple-checked, as they can have a lot of impact on your shop's legal status, among other things.
The default pages are "About Us", "Delivery", "Legal Notice", "Terms and Conditions", and "Secure Payment". Some of them have default content, which you should update; some others are empty, and you should paste your own text.
To edit these pages, go to the "Preferences" tab, click the "CMS" options, then choose the page you want to edit, or create new ones.
You can create as many pages as you feel is necessary.
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, move the content around, until you are satisfied with your menu's hierarchy.
Now that all is set and done, you can finally open your shop to the public.
Go the "Preferences / Maintenance" page, and change the two options:
Your shop should now be fully read to receive its first visitors... and its first orders!