PrestaShop vs Shopify: Comparing Small Business eCommerce Solutions

Whether you choose between eCommerce giants like PrestaShop and Shopify or any other options, selecting the best platform is crucial for an online store. It determines how you set up your website, list products, process payments, and oversee your operations.

Here, we’ll compare two options — PrestaShop and Shopify — to help you choose the right platform for your business goals and budget.

PrestaShop vs Shopify: A Quick Overview

At first glance, PrestaShop and Shopify appear similar. They offer tools to create and personalize online stores, list and promote products, process payments, handle orders, and provide shopping cart capabilities. Essentially, they are both comprehensive eCommerce platforms with many built-in features.

But upon closer inspection, you’ll spot a significant structural difference. Shopify is a paid, fully hosted platform. This means it handles hosting, security, upgrades, and maintenance for your online store as part of a monthly subscription fee.

On the other hand, PrestaShop is a free, open-source platform that requires self-installation. In addition, you’ll need to secure web hosting and manage maintenance and updates. Its open-source nature allows full access to its code. Essentially, it provides flexibility to customize your store and create an entirely unique look for your brand.

Shopify vs Prestashop: A Detailed Look

Cost is critical to any business decision, but the raw numbers shouldn’t be the only factor driving your decision. You also need to weigh the pros and cons of each option carefully. Below, we’ll unpack all of these factors.

PrestaShop offers a basic free and hosted plan at $26–$32 monthly.

Remember that your store setup will incur extra expenses regardless of your choice. These might include:

• Web hosting (approximately $4 to $14 monthly)
• A website domain
• Development and customization, especially if you hire a developer
• Maintenance, updates, and security monitoring
• PrestaShop add-ons and themes, which can range in price from $0 to over $200 per add-on

Shopify Pricing

In comparison, Shopify offers a more predictable pricing structure. Shopify provides subscription-based eCommerce solutions, allowing you to select a plan and pay a monthly fee. Note that you may incur additional costs for paid themes, app integrations, and using third-party payment gateways.

There are four core plans and an enterprise solution, Shopify Plus. The enterprise plan is aimed at high-volume merchants, and pricing is quoted according to sales volume.

The first and cheapest Plan, Shopify Starter ($5 per month), does not include creating a standalone online store. It is designed only to enable selling on social media or integrating products into an existing website or blog. The other three plans provide complete online store-building tools and increased functionality as the plans progress.

• Basic Plan: $19–$25 monthly, including two staff access accounts and basic sales reports.
• Shopify Plan: This plan, priced at $49–$65 per month, includes five staff access accounts and professional sales reports.
• Advanced Plan: At $299 to $399 per month, this includes 15 staff access accounts, a custom report builder, and third-party calculated shipping rates.

Offering a wide range of payment options increases your attractiveness to customers. PrestaShop and Shopify support all major credit and debit cards (Visa, MasterCard, and American Express) and selected mobile wallets.

PrestaShop plans include PrestaShop Checkout, which is built with PayPal. However, it also supports numerous payment extensions such as Stripe and Square. The platform does not charge any fees for using these external gateways. You’ll only incur the transaction fees your bank or the selected payment gateway levied. The per-transaction fees vary by provider.

Shopify also offers integration with numerous external payment gateways. However, depending on your Shopify plan, using them incurs extra fees of 0.6–2% per transaction. These fees are in addition to your transaction fees. You eliminate this additional cost when using Shopify Payments, Shopify’s in-house payment gateway.

Expect the following fees when using Shopify Payments:

• Shopify Starter: 5% per transaction
• Basic Plan: 2.9% + $0.30 per online transaction and 2.7% for in-person transactions
• Shopify Plan: 2.6% + $0.30 per online transaction and 2.5% for in-person transactions
• Advanced Plan: 2.4% + $0.30 per online transaction and 2.4% for in-person transactions

Shopify Payments offers a fraud analysis tool and a chargeback dispute process. However, it is not accessible in all countries. Merchants outside supported regions must use alternative payment gateways (which may incur extra fees) to handle transactions on their Shopify store.

Customizing your online store to align with your brand and mission is essential. A user-friendly and distinctive interface can boost sales and reduce bounce rates. While both Shopify and PrestaShop provide a range of themes and templates for free or purchase, they vary in flexibility and customization.

Shopify boasts a collection of over 80 themes that don’t require coding to rework the basic design. The platform simplifies the design process with a drag-and-drop interface, making it easy for beginners lacking technical knowledge. While you can customize many aspects of your store to match your branding and unique business features, there are limitations to how far you can go. You’ll have to stick to the template layout to an extent.

Shopify periodically releases new themes. However, since all users on the platform select from the same collection, your store’s design features might resemble those of other businesses.

Due to its open-source nature, Prestashop offers more extensive customization. If you have web development expertise, it allows total control over your store’s design. You can customize the default theme with PHP programming language or select and personalize one of the many themes available —over 2,500 — on the PrestaShop Addons Marketplace.

Although PrestaShop has a robust set of built-in features and endless customization possibilities, it is complex and not the most beginner-friendly option.

Shopify is a leading eCommerce platform mainly due to its user-friendly design. Its clean, intuitive interface and drag-and-drop builder are simple to navigate, making product additions straightforward with clear prompts. Setting up a store is a reasonably quick process compared to other platforms.

Shopify’s free mobile app lets you run your store on the go. The app allows you to process payments, fulfill orders, send shipment updates, handle inventory, and communicate with customers. Your data automatically stays in sync.

Shopify’s simplicity, comprehensive customer support, and a wide array of out-of-the-box features make it highly accessible for beginners.

While powerful and highly customizable, PrestaShop has a steeper learning curve and is more suited for users with technical expertise or those willing to learn the platform. It requires more hands-on management, especially when customizing or scaling the shop, which might be challenging for users seeking simplicity.

Both platforms allow you to integrate third-party tools and download add-ons to extend your store’s functionality. Shopify and PrestaShop offer extensive libraries with thousands of apps and extensions, from blog tools and shipping to chatbots and accounting software. Whatever functionality your store lacks, you will likely find an integration in either library to fill that gap.

While some free add-ons exist, many come at an additional cost. One advantage of PrestaShop is that its open-source nature allows developers to create custom modules, though this might require advanced technical expertise.

When comparing PrestaShop and Shopify’s features, it’s important to note that the platforms serve somewhat different audiences. They also have different strengths based on the scale and scope of the eCommerce operations they’re designed for.

There is a significant overlap. For example, both platforms let you list unlimited digital and physical products (with variations and categories), customize your shopping cart and checkout, provide inventory alerts and management tools, have multiple language options, and more. However, you might find that one platform is uniquely better for your needs.

For example, Shopify also has its own proprietary POS system, which might prove helpful if you conduct significant in-person sales. On the other hand, PrestaShop has the edge regarding SEO tools.

Performance comparisons between Shopify and PrestaShop can vary depending on several factors, such as hosting, store optimization, and the specific use case.

As a hosted platform, Shopify automatically handles hosting, security, and speed optimizations. Stores generally load quickly due to Shopify’s optimized infrastructure and content delivery network (CDN). The platform offers reliable uptime, ensuring stores are almost always accessible to customers.

Since PrestaShop is a self-hosted platform, performance can vary greatly depending on the quality of the chosen hosting service. If the developer has the technical skills to implement performance enhancements and choose the right hosting solution, performance can be highly optimized. Store performance can also be tailored to your specific needs, but this requires more hands-on management.

In essence, Shopify tends to offer better out-of-the-box performance due to its managed hosting environment. PrestaShop’s performance can be excellent but depends more on who sets up and maintains the store.

PrestaShop provides online customer support resources such as guides, webinars, tutorial videos, and access to a community forum. Unlike many other open-source platforms, PrestaShop offers an optional customer support plan for purchase, granting personalized technical assistance for your store. In addition, PrestaShop provides training programs led by its experts that are designed to educate merchants, developers, and digital professionals about the software’s features and use. While PrestaShop’s free plan does not offer phone or chat support, the hosted/paid plan does.

Meanwhile, Shopify provides 24/7 customer service through live chat, phone, and email. Additionally, the website features a help center with FAQs, guides, tutorials, and discussion forums. You can hire expert designers, developers, and marketers directly through Shopify for tailored assistance with your eCommerce business.

Shopify and PrestaShop handle security differently due to their fundamental structural differences.

Since Shopify is a hosted platform, it controls the hosting environment. Therefore, Shopify takes care of many security concerns for its users. This includes maintaining PCI compliance, providing SSL certificates for stores, and ensuring that its system is protected against attacks. For users who aren’t tech-savvy or don’t want to deal with the intricacies of securing their online store, Shopify is a good choice.

With PrestaShop, you’ll need to take care of your hosting, giving you more control and responsibility for security. You must ensure PCI compliance, set up SSL, manage your servers, and implement security measures. While the free plan does not include hosting, PrestaShop does offer an optional pre-installed and secured hosting solution that users can purchase from its hosting partner, 1&1 IONOS.

Which Is Best for My Business Needs: Shopify or PrestaShop?

The best solution between PrestaShop and Shopify depends on your business’s specific needs, budget, and technical knowledge.

For small businesses, the choice between PrestaShop and Shopify often leans toward the latter due to its ease of use. Users can launch a store relatively quickly with its intuitive setup and pre-designed templates; security and maintenance are taken care of, and integrated payment processing with Shopify Payments eliminates the complexity of third-party payment gateways.

While extremely powerful and scalable, PrestaShop typically requires more technical work. The costs associated with developing and maintaining a PrestaShop site (such as hosting, security, and extensions) can be higher, and they might be more than what a small business needs at the beginning stages.

However, if a small business has plans to scale rapidly and requires customizations that Shopify cannot quickly provide, PrestaShop might be the better long-term choice despite the higher initial investment.

Each platform has its own set of strengths that could make it more suitable for certain middle-market operations.

Shopify’s intuitive interface is pretty simple to manage, and the vast collection of apps can help businesses enhance and scale their store without needing custom development. In addition, straightforward pricing allows companies to gauge their store costs. Around-the-clock support is also a great perk.

PrestaShop, however, allows businesses to stand out with a unique design. A significant advantage of PrestaShop is its international selling features and high level of flexibility. Moreover, since PrestaShop does not charge additional fees for using third-party payment processors, businesses can save significantly on payment fees as sales increase.

PrestaShop may be the best choice for large corporations. These companies often have unique requirements that are more easily addressed with an adaptable open-source platform.

The platform is built to handle many products and transactions, is highly scalable, and allows for managing multiple stores and websites from a single backend. In addition, you can integrate with various third-party applications and systems, such as ERP, CRM, and PIM. This makes it easy to synchronize the eCommerce platform with other business processes.

While Shopify’s standard tiers may not necessarily compare to PrestaShop’s versatility, remember that the enterprise solution, Shopify Plus, is also a strong contender for large corporations. It maintains Shopify’s user-friendly aspect while handling high sales and traffic volumes. Shopify Plus provides dedicated support with a merchant success manager and a launch engineer to help with setup and ongoing operations.

Start Building Your eCommerce Future

When deciding between PrestaShop and Shopify, your technical skills, business needs, and long-term vision will determine the best platform. Shopify shines with its user interface, swift setup, and comprehensive support, making it an ideal choice for small businesses and startups prioritizing ease of use and speed to market. With its detailed features and scalability, PrestaShop appeals to companies with complex needs and the technical resources to harness its full potential.

Successfully building an eCommerce business requires offering customers convenient payment methods. Integrating the right payment processing option can help you drive sales and reduce unnecessary fees.

PaymentCloud provides tailored eCommerce payment processing solutions for businesses of all sizes, ensuring transaction fees don’t affect your profits. We offer a secure, PCI-compliant gateway, seamless cart integration, and quick transactions; and even support high-risk industries.

Unlike most payment providers that aren’t flexible with rates, PaymentCloud will work with you to tailor a solution that grows with your business and budget. Start building your eCommerce future today.

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