Prestashop is a very comprehensive, yet simple to use, ecommerce platform that forms the basis of some of TOSD’s most recent online shop solutions.
Access
Your access details will be supplied by TOSD. The administration area is password protected. Contact TOSD if you are unsure how to access the admin area of your online shop
Settings
All initial settings will be set up by TOSD. One preference you may wish to alter is Gift wrapping (admin/preferences … scroll down). Here you can indicate whether you wish to offer gift wrapping or not. If you do, you can also set the fee.
Categories
- Adding a category
- admin/catalog and click the “Add a new subcategory” link to add a category at the highese level . . . or, navigate to the existing category you wish to place a subcategory under and then click the “Add a new subcategory” link.
- insert a name and description (if required) for your category and then add the meta data. Meta data is very important for search engine optimisation. Goggle it if you need to know more.
- The friendly URL is added to the end of your domain name. It should be a relevany keyword associated closely with the category e.g. if the category was “Pots and Pans”, the friendly URL could be ‘pots-pans’ (note the use of a hyphen and no spaces. If after you click [Save] you navigate to the page you will see that the URL would be along the lines of: http://www.yourdomain.com.au/pots-pans/
- Adding a product
- Navigate to the required category and click the “Add a new product” link
- [Information] tab – as a minimum, enter the following information:
- Name
- Pre-tax retail price
- Tax (within Australia select GST from the drop down box)
- Quantity – can be set to ’1′ if you are not using Prestashop to track inventory (most businesses don’t)
- Category selection – check the box next to those categories you want the new product to be displayed in.
- Special Notee: If you select the ‘Home’ category, the product will also appear as a featured product on the home page.
- Click the ‘Click here to improve product’s rank in search engines (SEO)’ link to add Meta data. As with the categories, if you are unsure about this Google it. But it is important, so don’t leave these entries blank.
- Always fill out the short description. This will appear in the product listing (the page that appears after a customer clicks on a category)
- The “Description” entry appears as a tab (labelled “More Info”)toward the bottom of the detailed product page and provides you with great scope for adding additional supporting information.
- “Tags” are optional but a great idea. They provide the customer with an alternative way to search your site. For example consider an online fruit shop. The fruit would normally be categorised by type (vegetables, stone fruit, citrus etc) but could be tagged according to their vitamin content. In this case tomatoes and oranges could both be tagged “vitamin C”, even though they exist in different categories.
- “Accessories” – this is a very powerful facility that allows you to select any other product as an accessory to the one you are created. As with the “Description” information, accessories appear in a tab toward the bottom of the product page.
- Choose a save option to record the core information you have just added.
- [Images] tab - for best presentation it is very important that you images be correctly prepared. If you are unsure, ask TOSD before proceeding. It may well save a lot of wasted preparation time.
- Click [Browse] to navigate to the required image on your PC
- Add a relevant caption
- Leave the thumbnail resize method to the default, “automatic”.
- Click [Save Image] to complete.
And that’s it! You have now created a new product.
See also:
- Prestashop Attributes (options)
- Prestashop image preparation and upload
- Creating Prestashop information pages
- Prestashop: setting up GST for Australia
Did you find this article useful? Feel free to leave a comment.
