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

You want to engage in ecommerce and put an online store, 2 options available to you:

1. You already have a business and want to grow your turnover by throwing you into the adventure Internet by posting all or some of your articles (about a hundred items).
2. You do not trade, but you want to grow your income by creating a small shop, you can draw on the example of Tocoda example. In this case the first thing to do is to find the right idea. I would advise you to take a ride on a very good site: Niche Adsense, which is full of ideas for sites all over the original one that others (like: a site with activities for children or a site of application marriage ...).

Now you know what ecommerce choose, you must determine which platform will be most suitable.

I would advise you initially to test your store locally 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 achieve this step we will describe the software installation Magento and Prestashop.

Create your store using Magento

I advice you to install the test database, even if the products do not match those that you want to sell on your ecommerce. You can then give you an idea of products to create 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 yourself to our video on how to install Magento locally. This will you detail the steps to install:

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

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

Before using Magento you can if you want to install the effect lighbox for images of your product sheets. This effect can give a more professional online store.

Create your shop using Prestashop

We will now install our shop using Prestashop. These 2 facilities may quite be on the same computer, just use 2 different directories like: 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 facility with his shop Prestashop example.

The facility includes a shop Prestashop example, your shop is directly exploitable.

Using shops

Your 2 shops are now operational, it'll just use them. For this you can use our video: How to add items to your shop Prestashop to add items to your ecommerce. We will publish shortly the same type of item for Magento.

Provisional conclusion

Here, we come to the end of our first game.

If you are not completely decided for the software you used for your online store, having the 2 software installed on the same computer, you will more easily compare them and so you can choose one which best corresponds to your store.

Each software advantages and disadvantages. PrestaShop is an easier approach, particularly for administration and management, especially for small shops. Magento is more complete and has a number of possibilities that Prestashop did not or did not (multiboutiques ...).

We shall see in a future column, once your chosen ecommerce software, how to install in a host and how to make your online store.

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