PrestaShop is a popular e-Commerce solution which is free, powerful and easy to use. By using Prestashop, you can build an ecommerce website for free and start selling online effortlessly. If you want to create an online store, this open source ecommerce software could be a great helper.
PrestaShop hosting server
Inmotion web hosting is one of the best business hosting service providers you may consider. Its web hosting fits most businesses. Starting from $7.99/month, the Power hosting plan is the 1st choice for small business. SSD technology is the faster and more efficient alternative to traditional spinning hard drives. It enables enables greater throughput, quicker boot ups, file transfers, and overall snappier performance than HDDs, thus you site visitors can gain much faster access to your websites. SSD is included for FREE in all business hosting packages. See more details from this best SSD web hosting review.
What’s more Prestashop along with a lot more auto-installers are included for free in business hosting plans with Inmotion web hosting. You can set up a Prestashop in just couple of minutes with the help of the 1-click installer. It is not only the configuration of Prestashop has been made easy, but also the Prestashop backup, upgrade, restore, management.
PrestaShop domain name
Every site on the web needs an URL address or domain name so others can access your site. It just like your business name card. The current market price for a COM domain name is around $15. With InMotion Prestashop hosting, the domain name is included for free. Every business hosting purchase comes with a free domain name. You can get it during the checkout process when you buy their hosting plan. If you already have an existing domain for Prestashop, you can follow this guide to add domain name to cPanel with Inmotion, also choose to keep the free domain credit for the future.
Now we have a web server to host our Prestashop site and we get a domain name for it. It is time to start building the Prestashop.
How to build a Prestashop ecommerce site automatically?
Login your hosting control panel, the cPanel, with Inmotion using your username and password. When you are at the main screen of cPanel, scroll down to find the Software and Services section or box. Click to open Softaculous.
Softaculous is a series of web applications and auto-installers, including blogs, Micro blogs, portals, CMS, forums, Image galleries, Wikis, social networking, Ad management, calendars, mails, polls and surveys, project management, e-Commerce and more.
Find and click Prestashop from the home screen of Softaculous or from its E-Commerce sub-category at the left hand side. You will see a screen like below.
There are four tabs of the PrestaShop installation page, Install, Overview, Features and Import. By default the Install tab opens so you can start building a new PrestaShop from scratch. If you have already installed PrestaShop, you can also switch to the Import tab to import it.
*Click to enlarge image above.
PrestaShop software setup
Here you need to choose the version of PrestaShop software you want to install. Normally you can leave it to the default which is the latest version of PrestaShop.
If your site has SSL, choose the HTTPS protocol here. Also you will have the option to choose the PrestaShop site address with or without ‘www’as the prefix of your domain name. If you do not know which to use, you can leave it to the default for now as we can change it at a later time.
Choose a domain name or subdomain name to install Prestashop. Normally you should consider to install it to a top level domain name so your site visitors can remember it easier. If you can’t find your domain name from the list, make sure to add the domain to your cPanel. You can also scroll up to the Prestashop domain name section above where we have linked to the tutorial to add new domain to your hosting control panel.
In Directory means which directory do you want to install PrestaShop to on the web server. Leave it blank if you want to install PrestaShop to the domain root folder. Type in a new folder name if you want to install PrestaShop to a sub-folder, like http://mydomain/store. In this demo, ‘store’ is the new sub-folder name which does not exist under your domain root and your PrestaShop site files will all be copied to this directory. It is actually the actual root folder for your PrestaShop ecommerce site.
Type the name of the database to be created for the PrestaShop installation. The PrestaShop auto-installer will also generate a database name randomly. You can use this name or change it as you like.
PrestaShop site settings
Choose a store name for your PrestaShop shopping site. Also type in a admin folder name here. The Admin folder is for website administrators to access the back-end of your online store.
PrestaShop database settings
Choose a table prefix or leave it to the default one. By default the PrestaShop auto-installer will add ‘ps_’in front of each database table for your PrestaShop site. For enhanced security, we suggest you to change it.
PrestaShop admin account
This is the part to create a PrestaShop store administrator account. Input the admin email address, choose a admin account password. To make sure the password is secure enough, make use of the strength indicator below, when it turns to green when you input the password, it means your password is acceptable. Type in the PrestaShop admin user’s first name and last name.
PrestaShop advanced options
Generally speaking you do not need to change or enable the PrestaShop advanced options. For now we can see two options beneath: disable update notifications and audo upgrade. The former is to let the site administrator receive email notifications for available updates, the latter is to automatically upgrade your PrestaShop installation when a new version is available.
When you are done with the above PrestaShop configurations, hit the Install button at the bottom to begin installing PrestaShop. This process may take 3-4 minutes. Do not leave this page until the process bar reaches 100% and you get the congratulations message telling you the software was installed successfully. You will also see the PrestaShop site front URL address and administrative URL address from the same screen.
Now you know how to install PrestaShop ecommerce software and set up an online store by yourself.
