How to prepare for creating your online store with Magento or Prestashop

You want to engage in ecommerce and put a shop , two options are available:

1. You already have a business and want to develop your sales in you venture into the Internet, by posting some or all of your articles (about a hundred items).
2. You do not trade, but you want to grow your income by creating a small online store, you can learn from the example of tocode example. In this case the first thing to do is to find the right idea. I suggest you go for a ride on a very good site: Adsense Niche , full of ideas of all sites a more original than others (such as: a site of activities for children or a site application wedding ...).

You now know how to choose ecommerce, you need to determine which platform is most suitable.

I suggest you initially test your local store on your computer, why:

• It's easier and faster to install
• You can make comparisons by installing various software
• You can get 'hand' without fear for your online store

To carry out this step we will detail the software installation Magento and Prestashop .

Create your store using Magento

I suggest you install the test database, even if the products do not match those you wish to sell in your ecommerce. You can then give you an initial idea to create products and you can refer to existing products when you have a question about the creation of one of your products.

To do this go to our page: Installing the test database on Magento .

And help you in our video on how to install Magento locally . This is going to detail the steps to install:

• A local Apache server
• Your Mysql database
• Magento itself
• The establishment of the French pack for Magento

You just have to choose the theme to use for your online store, if you do not want to use the default, why you can go to the following sites: Ecommerce-themes.com or Magthemes.com .

Before using Magento you can if you wish to install the effect lighbox images of your product descriptions . This effect can make it look more professional to your online store.

Create your store using Prestashop

Now we will install our shop using Prestashop. These two facilities may well be on the same computer, just use two different directories such as: Magento and Prestashop, for example.

First, follow the steps in our video describing the installation of Prestashop locally .

As you have already installed Apache and Mysql database in the previous step, you can skip the first part and go directly to the installation of Prestashop shop with his example.

Installing Prestashop including a shop for example, your shop is directly exploitable.

Use of shops

Your two shops are now operational, it'll just use them. For this you can use our video: How to add items to your Prestashop to add items to your ecommerce. We will publish soon the same type of article to Magento.

Tentative conclusion

Here we come to the end of our first game.

If you are not completely decided on the software you used for your online store, having the two software installed on the same computer, you can more easily compare them and then you can choose the which best corresponds to your store.

Each software has its advantages and disadvantages. Prestashop is a first easier, especially for the administration and management, especially for small shops. Magento is more complete and has a number of options that Prestashop has not or has not (multi-boutique ...).

We will see in a future article, once your chosen ecommerce software, how to install a home and how to host your online store.

Articles on this topic:

1. Optimizations photos with Xnview to integrate them into your online store Please sign up for RSS feeds do not miss article.1ère Step: Preparation of photos to incorporate into your ecommerce store we saw in our previous Ticket: How to optimize photos product sheets ...
2. Magento: Transfer your shop on your online server from a local installation Feel free to sign up for RSS to not miss any article.Dans our previous tutorial we showed you how to install Magento on your computer using Xampp, we'll explain how to transfer your shop here on ...
3. Optimization of photos of items in your shop with Gimp Please sign up for RSS feeds do not miss article.Nous have seen in our previous post, it was necessary to rework your photographs to get a quick loading of pages of your ecommerce site and so ...