PrestaShop is an e-commerce leader among open source platforms

What are the best aspects of this product?

The biggest plus of using PrestaShop is that you can choose whether to run it on your native server, or to pick a cloud one that you like. I chose to run it natively (I have a pre-costumed OS X Client Server), and what I like the most is that I get to use it equally well on Microsoft and Linux. The tool is user-friendly, easy, and free, and for what I've seen so far, they are constantly working to improve the interface. Novice users without online business experience can also benefit from a free design interface to familiarize with the platform.

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

Not liking something about PrestaShop is just impossible. However, there are few hints I'd like to warn you about. First, don't run it natively unless you have the experience to do so! For the purpose, you'd have to know MySQL, some Apache basics, and PHP too.BIND and SSL are also desirable. To make things even worse, the ideal case is to run it on two servers (a back-up/maintenance one and a production one), and you can definitely mess up the database there if you don't know mySQL. For your first store, I recommend Bitnami Development, since running it on cloud is probably the easiest option available. Set up will run much smoother there, and back up will be automated. So, yes, choose that one!

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

Currently, I am translating the platform to Portuguese, but before that I had bigger challenges. There were few new OS X features which I didn't like, so I ran all applications on OSX Maverick. I am a developer, so I tried to make the most of my knowledge to do many updates, and I am planning to remove the automatic re-starting of the app following electricity failure. I mean, I like the feature in general, but in case there is no Bitnami developer to handle it once it goes on, I could lose valuable data. That's pretty much all, I'd maybe advise you to use Oracle for MySQL, and Bitnami OSX (Mamp Stack) for PHP and Apache.

Are you a current user of this product?

Yes