PrestaShop

PrestaShop is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP for building and running your own online stores. It is installed on your own server, giving you full control over your data, design and functionality — without the recurring licence fees typical of SaaS solutions.

How PrestaShop works

PrestaShop is a web application that, once installed on hosting, provides an admin panel for managing the entire store plus a customer-facing storefront. It stores product, order and customer data in a MySQL or MariaDB database. Its main components are:

• Admin panel — managing products, categories, prices, orders and customers.
• Modules — extensions adding payments, courier integrations, marketing and price comparison feeds.
• Themes — templates that control the look and responsiveness of the store.
• Multi-language and currencies — native support for international sales.

PrestaShop in practice

PrestaShop is chosen mainly by merchants who value flexibility:

1. Dedicated stores — businesses building the shop as their main sales channel.
2. Large catalogues — stores with many products, variants and categories.
3. International sales — support for multiple languages, currencies and tax rates.

For stable operation, a PrestaShop store needs an efficient server environment with an up-to-date PHP and a fast database — as traffic and catalogue grow, hosting with NVMe disks or a dedicated VPS that delivers predictable performance is a sensible choice.

Benefits and challenges

PrestaShop's biggest advantage is independence: the merchant owns the code, the data and the freedom to modify everything, without being tied to a single vendor. A large marketplace of modules and themes makes it possible to tailor the store to almost any industry. The downside of self-hosting, however, is responsibility for updates, backups and security — a neglected environment quickly becomes a target for attacks. That is why, when choosing PrestaShop, it is worth planning regular core and module updates and automatic backups from the outset, to combine the platform's flexibility with reliable store operation.