Accept Credit & Debit Cards on your PrestaShop powered store

PrestaShop has made selling products online cost effective, easy and quick, it’s a great ecommerce solution, ironically one area where it’s lacking is in the Payment area.

Internet Merchant Account, or just use PayPal?

For most people, deciding which solution to use for their online store depends on setup costs, time and complexity, this is generally why most smaller online shops opt for a standard PayPal account and use the included PayPal module that is included with PrestaShop.

Whilst there’s nothing wrong with this approach, I imagine many PrestaShop users are frustrated, as the standard PayPal module, although free and simple to setup, looks a little amateurish when compared to a ‘proper’ payment system as used by the big ecommerce websites.

If, like me, you want a middle option, an affordable solution that looks much more professional than a redirect to a PayPal payment page, then what you really need is a ‘PayPal Websites Payments Pro‘ account and a better PayPal Module.

PrestaShop PayPal Payments Pro Module

Well look no further!, the PayPal Direct Module, allows you to accept credit/debit cards directly on your PrestaShop store, no ugly redirects and PayPal payment pages to scare off potential customers here.

Setup is simple, firstly you need a PayPal Website Payments Pro account, if you don’t already have one then simply apply for one via the PayPal website, for UK sellers you also need a 3D Secure account, don’t worry this is free and just requires a simple registration form to be completed online and takes a day or two to be setup, visit this website and complete the required fields with the following details:

Once installed and configured you’ll be able to start accepting credit and debit card payments, you may need to tweak your PrestaShop Theme and/or the included CSS stylesheet ( which needs copying and pasting into your Global CSS file ).

We now use this module in our own store, shop.prestathemes.com and I’ve also just replaced the standard PayPal module on one of my other websites here: stickybottles.co.uk , the module worked perfectly once configured, I did need to make a small alteration to my Themes CSS to align the payment page correctly, however this will depend on your particular Theme.

I hope this post has been helpful, especially to the UK PrestaShop owners out there, as this module is sure to reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts and is also more secure for your customers as it uses the Verified by Visa and Mastercard SecureCode .

Love Costa Coffee, well now you can buy them online!

As a Costa Coffee lover myself, I thought wouldn’t it be great if I could order their beans online, well now you can! I created costashop.co.uk to provide a service to other CostaCoffee fans and also to showcase the abilities of the PrestaShop Shopping Cart

So if you live in mainland UK and want to buy Costa Coffee beans Online then visit Costa Shop!

I’d just like to give a quick mention to Tim at Titans Gym Blackpool.

The website has just gone live and there’s some pretty impressive strongman videos on there!

Problems with Prestashop SEO Friendly URLs?

If you’re having problems after enabling SEO friendly URL’s in your PrestaShop backend then keep reading!

Problems such as broken links and missing images are very common, before you do anything else try following these steps:

• Upload a blank .htaccess file into your prestashop root directory.
• Then enable SEO friendly urls in your preferences tab in the backend of PrestaShop.
• Once that is done you then have to generate a .htaccess using ‘tools’ in the ‘generators’ section.
• Then, you need to reinstall the featured home products and categories modules, if things still aren’t working as they should then try reinstalling all modules.

Hopefully you should now have SEO friendly URL’s and your product links and images should be working!

Who uses PrestaShop and Why?

I’m guessing that the reason you’re reading this is because you want or already have your own online shop, well whilst thinking about the visitors we get here at PrestaThemes I realised that everyone wants the same thing when it comes to eCommerce, we want an affordable solution that’s effective and easy to setup and use.

You’ve chosen wisely!

As the owner of PrestaThemes I have personal experience of some of the not so good eCommerce software, I’ve had projects that have taken weeks to setup due to poorly designed software that is complicated to install and configure. Lets look at what every shop owner needs:

• A domain name
• Web Hosting
• Products to sell
• eCommerce software
• Customers to buy the product

In essence it’s pretty simple, however get just one of these wrong and you don’t have a business, having the wrong eCommerce solution may not prevent you from making sales, but why struggle? PrestaShop is free to use, simple to setup and has all the features you need to create a successful online business.

Setting up any website requires an investment, even if it’s just time, what you don’t want to do is choose a poor solution and then waste more time and effort changing your hosting or eCommerce solution.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed PrestaThemes not only sell the best Themes around, but we also offer everything you need to setup your own shop!