The whole world is going online. With the advent of the Internet there is a substantial transformation in the retail landscape. Over 25% of people purchase something online at least once a week. Having an e-commerce business in your kitty helps in the overall sale of the products and services. A free open source e-commerce platform which can be easily downloaded and is easy to set up will make life at ease.

By any chance if you are planning to set an e-commerce store and you were keen in checking on the peers, you might have noticed two important platforms all over the Internet – PrestaShop and WooCommerce. Which one is best? To answer this question we shall have a sneak into their features by doing a comparison of these two major global retail frameworks.

Before comparing the features let us have an overview of both platforms.

PrestaShop: PrestaShop is an e-commerce platform that uses the self-hosted or open source option and a dependable content management system for e-commerce stores. PrestaShop has more than three hundred built-in features for managing product listing, payments, shipping, manufacturers and suppliers.

WooCommerce: WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress designed for small to large-sized online merchants. It is a completely customizable e-commerce platform, has a good customer support system and is fully customizable.

PrestaShop vs WooCommerce – Features Comparison:

A deeper dive into the features of both the platforms helps in making important decisions while choosing the right e-commerce platform.

Content Management System:

PrestaShop’s content management system helps create information pages but has limited options.

WooCommerce has an underlying WordPress layer that provides excellent content management. It seamlessly integrates commerce with content.

Security :

PrestaShop: This open-source platform is PCI compliant and you need to implement your own SSL encryption. While the payments are secured by the relevant payment gateway.

WooCommerce: Using WordPress security plugins, WordPress security best practices and SSL encryption helps this open-source platform secure. Using SSL the payment gateway is also secured.

Pricing:

PrestaShop is is free to download and to use. There is a big price attached to the add-ons and modules. The additional and recurring costs will quickly add up.

WooCommerce is free and also an open-source platform. The underlying WordPress has tens of thousands of plugins available for free and there is nothing to pay for except for the basic things that come with running any website. It also has much cheaper themes and extensions.

Customer support:

WooCommerce offers better customer support by providing tons of documentation, self-help resources and WordPress forums. It also helps to mitigate problems via a ticket system for any queries and the staff will get back with the help the customer is looking for. Developers are regularly updating and releasing new versions in regular intervals.

PrestaShop offers free access to training materials, documentation and the user forum. Also, it provides a premium technical support option that costs from $249 upwards. One drawback is that of the new add-ons created which makes it the support team impossible to answer the queries of the constantly changing software.

Conclusion:

Choosing the right e-commerce platform will be great deal of bet. Because the competition between WooCommerce and PrestaShop is high, both try their best to reach customer satisfaction. User wishes to use that platform which will allow them to boost their online business.

Both the platforms provide few basic built-in features to manage their online stores. By comparing the pros and cons of both, WooCommerce stands one step high in the race. With the features like design, themes, pricing, plug-ins, add-ons and even customer engagement, WooCommerce offers significant advantages over PrestaShop.