PrestaShop Cloud: Advantages and disadvantages

Bruno Lévêque, founder of PrestaShop published today putting up Prestashop Cloud, a new system in which any user can create your online shop without the need of hiring a hosting service, since Prestashop facilitates your own server for free.

It is an option for those who want to know how Prestashop. The user only has to enter your details and the name of his store, accompanied by pswebshop.com

As we see in the following comparative, the client can access almost all the options of Prestashop.

It is a good choice for small projects or tests. And most importantly: is free. However up to the free has a cost.. .then you realize that free is not the most important thing.

Question No. 1 property: "My" store Online

When we accept that the server is in another, we are really saying that our shop is no longer so our:

As article 2 of the terms and conditions of Prestashop Cloud, Prestashop can modify whenever you want anything that it deems appropriate. So the user will always be at the expense of their changes. Of course, we believe that Prestashop always want to help their customers. However it rains not always to everyone's taste, and what is good for business, so perhaps not overnight.

Issue N ° 2 customizing shop: forget of the "somewhat higher"

Article 5.6 makes clear that the user of Prestashop Cloud You may not install any module that is not of PRESTASHOP S.A.

Therefore if there is a module that a user needs, but is not of PRESTASHOP S.A can not make use of it. Each store is different and has clients with different needs so a general module is not as convenient to shop online. There will always be some functionality that modify some aspect of the design change and some other whim that we want to improve in order to adapt it to the store. Quirks include the: a little bit more to the left, that blue not so blue, that add me an attribute price and discount me another...

If the user does not have the expertise to develop the application you need, you can go to independent PrestaShop technicians to do it for him. With Prestashop Cloud, this possibility does not exist. You will have to accept that Prestashop S.A has designed. And watch out! It will always be best, but the best is appropriate to each and Prestashop Cloud does not offer individual treatment, obviously because they could not process the thousands of requests that would be you.

This can translate into equal stores without a differentiating feature. And if your store is the same that the rest, why would a customer choose your store? Colors, positions, functionalities... nobody can modify those aspects since anyone can have access to the code. Just Prestashop.

Issue N ° 3 performance and SEO: dad when we arrived?

We will still have to learn more about your hosting, but something is clear: when you travel with the full boot, the holiday trip is anything less fluid. If your hosting hosts a large number of shops, the optimization can not be customized in Apache or Php.

On the other hand the hosting should be located in a particular country. Is it in France? Do not assume a delay in the SEO of our shop? If our market is Spanish, our hosting should be located in Spain. 

As always save money on hosting is striking, but the user will have to decide whether you prefer to sacrifice the money to actually becoming the owner of your store and be able to design it as you wish, not as leave you.

What do you think?

Fluent: Terms and conditions of Prestashop Cloud https://www.prestashop.com/cloud/cgu/cgu-PrestaShop-Cloud_en.pdf