Changing from prestashop who to use??

[Wedding Heaven]

Hello,

We are changing from prestashop after a year of using just want a change, and was wondering who to go to?

Was going to use opencart?

But wondered if anyone could give recommendations or offer some help?

Thanks

 

[Faevilangel]

work out which platform has the features and flexibility you need, look at the various open source systems such as OC, Magento and then onto the paid apps such as cube cart, x-cart and actinic.

I could probably recommend a system which would be ideal for you, but I don't know your needs, your uses and your intentions for the site growth.

Look at all the carts above, ignore the price and just look at the features and make a decision based on that, as you want the cart to work for the business, so you don't need to change again in 6 months.

 

[Wedding Heaven]

work out which platform has the features and flexibility you need, look at the various open source systems such as OC, Magento and then onto the paid apps such as cube cart, x-cart and actinic.

I could probably recommend a system which would be ideal for you, but I don't know your needs, your uses and your intentions for the site growth.

Look at all the carts above, ignore the price and just look at the features and make a decision based on that, as you want the cart to work for the business, so you don't need to change again in 6 months.

We are using vidahost for our provider so just have what they have on the system, we are selling car stereos online, so online selling, the normal stuff nothing special really. Just something with a better layout really as we don't like prestashop really

 

[Faevilangel]

Do you want support and guidance for the site? That's what the paid systems offer, is more support.

I am personally a fan of OC but Magento is also really good (but a right pain and ideally needs a vps / dedicated server to make it work faster).

 

[Wedding Heaven]

Do you want support and guidance for the site? That's what the paid systems offer, is more support.

I am personally a fan of OC but Magento is also really good (but a right pain and ideally needs a vps / dedicated server to make it work faster).

Don't really mind about support as its easily found online for free if its needed.

We are looking at OC as we are building our trade site though it and find it better layout and better for SEO.

We have our current one via prestashop and want to transfer to OC just worried about loosing links and the SEO

 

[Faevilangel]

Don't really mind about support as its easily found online for free if its needed.

We are looking at OC as we are building our trade site though it and find it better layout and better for SEO.

We have our current one via prestashop and want to transfer to OC just worried about loosing links and the SEO

To minimise the risk of losing the seo you have built up, you need to:

- copy all the page titles etc across like for like
- Move all the products over (should be able to export from ps and import to oc).
- 301 any old links to new links e.g. if product A on ps is:

http://www.mysite.co.uk/products/product-a/3456.html

in OC, grab the new URL and then write a 301 redirect (in the htaccess) to send old links to the new one).

Depending on how the pageurls are written in both platforms and number of url's to write, this could be a time consuming process.

Any decent dev company should be able to do this, run the OC store in a dev state until you have 100% tested everything.

Moving sites from one platform to another is stressful and a lot of things can go wrong, but with plenty of planning and testing, you should be fine.

Don't rush it and make time when you make the "switch" to test the "new" site and fix any issues that occur as you will never get everything right in the testing.

 

[Wedding Heaven]

To minimise the risk of losing the seo you have built up, you need to:

- copy all the page titles etc across like for like
- Move all the products over (should be able to export from ps and import to oc).
- 301 any old links to new links e.g. if product A on ps is:

http://www.mysite.co.uk/products/product-a/3456.html

in OC, grab the new URL and then write a 301 redirect (in the htaccess) to send old links to the new one).

Depending on how the pageurls are written in both platforms and number of url's to write, this could be a time consuming process.

Any decent dev company should be able to do this, run the OC store in a dev state until you have 100% tested everything.

Moving sites from one platform to another is stressful and a lot of things can go wrong, but with plenty of planning and testing, you should be fine.

Don't rush it and make time when you make the "switch" to test the "new" site and fix any issues that occur as you will never get everything right in the testing.

Sounds like a lot of time and stress really, would cart2cart be any use? Or would paying someone to do it any easier?

 

[Faevilangel]

Sounds like a lot of time and stress really, would cart2cart be any use? Or would paying someone to do it any easier?

C2C will move the database stuff (products, orders etc) but won't do the url's etc, and it's an automated thing, meaning any issues might not be picked up.

Link to the url's

Couple of Q's:

1) Is the design going to change?
1a) Is the design needing to be done by the dev (or will you use someone else)
2) How many products do you have?
3) How many orders do you have?
4) How many customers accounts do you have?
5) How many static / cms pages do you have (under tools > cms)?

Moving the site needs to be done manually imho, making sure everything is right and the urls are working.

You will pay a lot for this to be done (depends on the above info) but it means that everything should be done right and works.

I had to do a move on another platform and greatly under estimated the time to move the content across, and ended up being a 4 month project instead of 2.

These things can't be rushed and can take a lot of time, due to the numerous complexities which can come up when moving platforms.

 

[Wedding Heaven]

C2C will move the database stuff (products, orders etc) but won't do the url's etc, and it's an automated thing, meaning any issues might not be picked up.

Link to the url's

Couple of Q's:

1) Is the design going to change?
1a) Is the design needing to be done by the dev (or will you use someone else)
2) How many products do you have?
3) How many orders do you have?
4) How many customers accounts do you have?
5) How many static / cms pages do you have (under tools > cms)?

Moving the site needs to be done manually imho, making sure everything is right and the urls are working.

You will pay a lot for this to be done (depends on the above info) but it means that everything should be done right and works.

I had to do a move on another platform and greatly under estimated the time to move the content across, and ended up being a 4 month project instead of 2.

These things can't be rushed and can take a lot of time, due to the numerous complexities which can come up when moving platforms.

We have recently opened the store so been open 2 months maybe and been adding stuff as we go and not done proper SEO or anything like that.

1. Yes we want a new design so it will change.
A. We designed the last one so we can do this again as we would use basic layout and change later on if needed
2. At the moment 425
3. Had 2 orders at present
4. 2 accounts
5. I don't know have to look at that later but unsure really I think about 9 pages.

Could you give a quote on that?

Our main links are to the homepage could we just stop the old one and then do the new one would home links be safe?

Thanks for the help

 

[Faevilangel]

We have recently opened the store so been open 2 months maybe and been adding stuff as we go and not done proper SEO or anything like that.

1. Yes we want a new design so it will change.
A. We designed the last one so we can do this again as we would use basic layout and change later on if needed
2. At the moment 425
3. Had 2 orders at present
4. 2 accounts
5. I don't know have to look at that later but unsure really I think about 9 pages.

Could you give a quote on that?

Our main links are to the homepage could we just stop the old one and then do the new one would home links be safe?

Thanks for the help

So you have potentially 425+ links to either rewrite or redirect, which is going to be a time consuming task.

I won't quote as it's not something I could do for the next month or so, due to a lot of work on, but I would normally charge in the region of £1000 for a custom design, installation / setup of OC, importing content etc.

I would then work on an hourly basis for the url stuff, probably looking at 3/4 hours, due to the complexities involved.

 

[Wedding Heaven]

So you have potentially 425+ links to either rewrite or redirect, which is going to be a time consuming task.

I won't quote as it's not something I could do for the next month or so, due to a lot of work on, but I would normally charge in the region of £1000 for a custom design, installation / setup of OC, importing content etc.

I would then work on an hourly basis for the url stuff, probably looking at 3/4 hours, due to the complexities involved.

I can see the problem there really..

Do you know if OC has extensions for google feeds, and similar ones as google analyistics?

 

[Faevilangel]

I can see the problem there really..

Do you know if OC has extensions for google feeds, and similar ones as google analyistics?

GA is built in by default (see guide here)

Product feeds are paid plugins here

 

[Wedding Heaven]

GA is built in by default (see guide here)

Product feeds are paid plugins here

If I was to try this myself how would I go around the URL part? I get the copying title and meta tags. Just not URL

 

[webstore]

Key thing to moving any on-line shop is make sure you have all your data ideally in say MySQL or failing that having your data in say various exported .csv files.

That data can then be re-worked in say Excel and then be subsequently exported as suitable .csv files that are compatible for OpenCart import software.

If you have been spending all your time entering your product data etc via your browser with no means of getting that data exported then you could use mozenda.com scraping software to recover your data.

Regarding 301 redirects from old URL to new URL this could be a bit of a slog building your .htacess file full of masses of redirects.

 

[Oakleaf Studio UK]

Regarding 301 redirects from old URL to new URL this could be a bit of a slog building your .htacess file full of masses of redirects.

Exactly what I was thinking.

Also, if it's just a matter of falling out of love with PrestaShop is it really worth all this hassle to change and risk losing rankings?

You may find there are things with OpenCart that bug you too. I have worked with both and they both have their strengths and weaknesses. One thing with PrestaShop that really bugs me though is performance. It can be so slow if not configured correctly.

 

[webstore]

My preference is Magento given its so feature rich & there are probably more third party developers producing extensions for that, more than any other ecommerce solution. However, Magento does need a lot of time to learn and if one does not have time, then OpenCart makes for a second best.

Now onto the mass 301 problem. I regret how I would deal with this is Magento based (it's a little while since I did anything on OpenCart) and would rely on you having an export of your Prestashop product & category data to include page URLs. Not sure if this is possible with Prestashop ?

Anyway if it was, I would rework the Prestashop data such that it was Magento compatible while at the same time maintaining a parked record of the Prestashop page URLs. After uploading data to Magento, leaving Magento to generate page URLs, I would then export that data to include Magento URLs which I would then match off with Prestashop URLs. Then with a bit of simple concatenation in Excel, I would produce a comprehensive .htaccess file matching each old Prestashop URL to the new Magento URL. (It's possible - but not definite - the same might be possible with OpenCart).

 

[iKam]

Hello,

We are changing from prestashop after a year of using just want a change, and was wondering who to go to?

Was going to use opencart?

But wondered if anyone could give recommendations or offer some help?

Thanks

If you haven't heavily Invested at all on SEO in your current cart and it has only brought in 2 orders and 2 accounts to be honest I'd just set up a new store and move the database across. You will have nothing to loose. I can understand the issue if you had a busy store which loads of orders and accounts. Just my opinion.

 

[alexlhh]

prestashop does not work good enough for you? why do you risk everything to change..and yep, openCart seems to be a good substitution.

 

[alexlhh]

oh, magento community is another good option too.

 

[antropy]

We are changing from prestashop after a year ... going to use opencart?

Yes, OpenCart is great and it's something we could help with, feel free to PM or email [email protected]

 

[FlatRockTechnology]

Hello,

We are changing from prestashop after a year of using just want a change, and was wondering who to go to?

Was going to use opencart?

But wondered if anyone could give recommendations or offer some help?

Thanks

Hi,

If you want to change your current e-commerce platform to OpenCart or any other, you should carefully consider whether you have the right people to do the migration for you. If you need any assistance in the data migration or the installation of a new online shop, Flat Rock Technology will be happy to help. You can send me an email or call me on 02071938298 with some more details and I can send a quote.

Thanks,
Poly

 

[LauraBrighton]

Check out Create.net for an easy to use service with a lot of features but it is cheaper than most and there are no hidden transaction fees unlike some. Great, friendly customer service who are happy to talk you through your build - it's via email but they will get back to you quickly. They're reliable and have been around for a long time. You get hosting with the packages too.

 

[RubixEvolution]

Magento and Opencart are the most suggested ecommerce open sources, check both and you decide which one you want to go for. There isn't much difference.

 

[rashisree]

Hi, Try Zeuscart which is the best free advanced php shopping cart software to create your store.

 

[Cart By Design]

Hi, Try Zeuscart which is the best free advanced php shopping cart software to create your store.

Their site looks rather unhappy with the world with depreciated errors everywhere LOL

 

[dingbat]

I was looking to move to Prestashop from Zencart. Mainly because I heard such recommendation for it on this forum. Admittedly I haven't been here for a while.

Has something changed in the Prestashop world?