PrestaShop training report: first steps, 16-17 March 2016

Adam PrestaShop 20.03.2016 Reading time: 3 min

On 16 and 17 March I took part in the official introductory training organized by the Polish branch of Prestashop. It was planned to last two hours a day. On 16 and 17 March I had the opportunity to take part in the official introductory training organized by the Polish branch of Prestashop. It was scheduled to last two hours each day, from 10:00 to 12:00 noon, but both parts ran a little longer. It was held as a webinar and was available free of charge. The first day began with the history of Presta and a description of its most important features. After a short theoretical introduction we moved on to practice, and that is how it stayed until the end of the training. First, the installation of a sample store. You could choose between the classic mode and the recently available installation in the Prestashop cloud. The presenter had prepared an installation in advance, but even trying on my own after the training I managed to start my own instance in less than 5 minutes. Unfortunately, the Prestashop Cloud solution is not perfect. The hosting, although free, is not fast enough. But the biggest limitation is that a store set up this way only has the standard template, and to change it you have to buy a template from the official Prestashop Addons store. Free alternatives are not available either. Even so, if someone wants to check how their own Prestashop store would work, there is no faster way. Next the presenter moved on to further topics. As he put it himself, he knows what people struggle with most at the beginning, and the list of topics covered was based on that. The basic front office and back office functions were discussed, followed by store administration in more depth. A lot of time was devoted to products, and when adding combinations even the presenter got lost for a moment. Of course, he quickly arrived at the right solution. The penultimate part was the configuration of options related to the delivery of goods. Many important details were shown there. The first day of the training ended with a question-and-answer session. The second day was devoted mostly to customer management. I learned that mass actions, such as disabling or deleting many customers at once, are only available from Prestashop version 1.5. A lot of time was also devoted to cart management. An example was given of how to lure a customer into visiting a brick-and-mortar store. In the cart options you can set a discount if the customer collects the parcel in person at the physical location – this way they may become interested in something else from the store as well. Among the curiosities, I learned what “credit slips” means – it is a receipt confirming that goods were received in the case of a return, which does not exist in Poland. That is valuable information, because I did not know how to translate it in Polish stores. To sum up, a very good training. It should be a must for everyone starting to work with Prestashop. webinar