How to Speed Up Your Prestashop and Thirtybees Shop: 5 Tips to Optimize Performance

PrestaShop and its fork, Thirtybees ecommerce are open source platforms that allow anyone to create their own online shop. Written in PHP, PrestaShop and its fork, Thirtybees ecommerce are popular solution for websites of all sizes thanks to its wide selection of add-ons. Check out each of the 5 tips below for advice on how you can speed up your own PrestaShop site.

1. First off You Must Combine, Compress and Cache

This option will condense all of your CSS, JS, and HTML into single lines of code, therefore, getting rid of any white space or unnecessary characters. What this will do is to make your file sizes smaller, and your web pages will load faster. From the top menu bar, look under the Advanced Preferences tab and click on Performance. Then, look for the CCC option.

Choosing a Cache Module
The importance of implementing a cache module cannot be underestimated. On top of reducing page load times by several seconds, in some cases, they can drastically reduce your server load since delivering cached files consumes minimal resources.

However. not all caching modules are created equally. There are free ones out there, but if you are a serious online store owner/manager, you should invest in a premium option like Cache API.

Prestaspeed Cache Module is an API that creates static html files from your prestashop or thirtybees webshop and encrypt the cached pages.

When a page is rendered, php and mysql are used. Therefore, system needs lots and lots of RAM and CPU resources. Imagine if thousands of visitors come into your site all requesting the same content, it’s a good thing, but what these visits does to your system is use lots of RAM and CPU so your page now is rendering like a snail on a freeway.

In this case, you need a cache system not to render page again and again. Guarantee your ecommerce website page load with Prestaspeed Cache API module that generates a static html file, encrypt, and saves it for faster load time of up to less than a second. Incredible!

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what do you think is the most important question to ask when launching an ecommerce website?

In ecommerce website development, people often ask themselves the wrong questions. This is a statement I make regularly, people do not ask the right questions to launch an e-commerce website, we reason almost always in the wrong way.

I get plenty of opportunities to regularly talk to merchants who are embarking on e-commerce and their attention is almost always never in the right place. What comes first in the merchants’ mind is the graphic appearance — the visual aspect.

Perhaps it is how we, humans are really wired up! We always fell for the appearance first and virtue/value second.

Read full post at Shoptech Media the most important question to ask when launching an ecommerce website. 

Rake Up Sales with Holiday Sale Module for Prestashop and thirtybees Website

The holiday season is just around the corner! It is the time to create your sales campaign and rake in profit! Are you ready for the big BANG! Will your ecommerce store take off this holidays?

Online sales are growing each year, and it looks like more people prefer to buy this way rather than standing in line  and fighting in stores for an Xbox. Last year online retailers reported a record-breaking $46.5 billion in revenue for the period of November 1 – December 31 alone!

According to the NRF, with major holidays such as Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Halloween and Christmas just around the corner, an NRF survey revealed that 179 million Americans are expected to spend as much as $9.1 billion—and that’s just for Thanksgiving and Black Friday alone. Spending on costumes is pegged at $3.4 billion, candy at $2.7 billion and decorations at $2.7 billion.

Tony Bianci, a store manager for Halloween Adventure in New York, said that he does 60 percent to 70 percent of his business in September and October. The most in-demand costumes include Wonder Woman, and characters from “Descendants” are popular among kids.

60 percent to 70 percents of business sales are made from September to December!

With all these data, it would be wise to prepare your sales campaign for the holidays NOW!

How might you prepare your Prestashop or thirtybees ecommerce website for the holiday season?

• First thing you do is to NEVER make any major changes to functionality. This season is the time to make sales, this is not the time to make changes! But if you do want to make changes, just a little cosmetics to reflect the holiday season would do.
• Check you server to see if it is flexible enough to handle a spike in traffic?
• Test and retest the strength of you ecommerce website security.  You don’t want hackers to hack into your system at a time where  you are making the most sales, right?
• Double check on you  holiday shipping deadlines.
• Optimize you webiste for the holidays with a Holiday Sale Module.

Rake Up Sales with Holiday Sale Module for Prestashop and thirtybees Website

Learning Prestashop and Thirty bees: Working With Shipping Carriers

Shipping is an integral and crucial part of any ecommerce website! It is an important turning point for your e-commerce website especially this up-coming holidays.

Every country uses or have its own shipping parcel that users and customers prefer. But for the sake of this tutorial, we are gonna be focusing on working with the Shipping module we have available for us on Prestashop or thirtybees ecommerce system.  We are just going to leave the countries behind and learn how the shipping module is being set up from the admin console of your Prestahop or thirtybees ecommerce website.

You can basically create you own shipping table and offer different shipping options for your customers and users. For example, you can offer a a faster delivery alternative to a standard (eg in express) one, depending on how you set your shipping options. Some of the customers agree to pay more for a shorter delivery time. There is also the option of offering a one-day shipping or ship on the same day option. Buyers look very closely at shipping costs, so try to be as fair as possible.

Plenty of choices you can create from the backend of your store with Prestashop and thirtybees ecommerce.

Let’s dive in to learning prestashop and thirtybees properly: working with Shipping module!

In this tutorial we are going to explore the following:

• Creating a Shipping Carrier
• Creating shipping costs
• Adding size, weight and group access
• Remove and enabling handling charges from carrier preferences.

Read full post at Learning Prestashop and Thirty bees: Working With Shipping Carriers

How to Make Sure Your ecommerce Store Is Not Losing Sales

In e-commerce nothing is for certain, ever – because even if your website worked well initially, you can have a lot of unforeseen events that will make you lose buyers and slow down your sales.

Warning:  DO NOT TAKE UNNECESSARY RISKS!

With the fast turn around of software updates and development, as an owner- you can never sit back and let your website run without you. You must have a regular schedule to test it and frequently.

Your ecommerce website must be tested regurlarly!

When our ecommerce website development team make a webshop for clients, we always test it – it is necessary that we test it – first with shoptech Media team and with the client.  WE don NOT release anything without testing. Does this mean that every website we make is perfect? Far from it! Are there any bugs? Of course there is and will be! But we do our best to keep it at the minimum. Even the giants Facebook, Google, and Amazon have bugs on their system comes up from time to time! What is important is the ecommerce website is functioning as it should and robustly tested.

The reality of all things internet- especially ecommerce – are these:

Systems that works today may NOT work the next day – and you can lose sales without you noticing.

Delighted customers help speed up your business sales by sharing their positive experiences with friends and peers, and those word-of-mouth reviews matter most to people who are making purchasing decisions.

Bad website experience drives away potential sales!

It would be too stupid to lose customers due to bad experience while using your website because you have neglected to check on your ecommerce website system, failing to do so can/will cost you $$$$. The funny thing is that –  in my experience, this is all too common around the web. I have seen websites that has not been visited much more checked for 2-3 years.

Read full article How to Make Sure Your ecommerce Store Is Not Losing Sales

Is your ecommerce website maintainable?

One of the big problems ecommerce merchants commonly face is that of being regularly confronted with software updates from the developers of Prestashop or thirty bees, or for that matter, all open-source ecommerce platforms in the world. The challenge is, how to keep pace with these unending new version releases?

Take for example, a giant ecommerce website Magento, it releases new version every year since 2014. And I can say the same with Prestashop and thrity bees.  This goes the same with web programming languages such as PHP, Javascript, etc.

The dreaded “New update available message!”

How do you keep up with these challenge so that your Prestashop Ecommerce Store is Maintainable?

What exactly is the landing page?

A landing page on my ecommerce website? Yes, a landing page! Have you heard of it before? Do you know that landing pages are often the best weapon when you do targeted advertising to convert into sales for your ecommerce website? Landing pages condition the buyer and is able to manipulate his buying behavior.

What exactly is the landing page?

In fact the landing page is the page that serves as an intermediate page before showing the final page of your website or the product page. Landing pages are often associated and used along side a paid advertising campaign. When the user clicks on the sponsored link it is brought first to the landing page which then points to the final page (the product, the offer of the moment etc).

Why put an intermediary page on a Prestashop or thirtybees website? How does it work?

The reason is quite simple, it is necessary that the user understands what is expected of him and for that it is necessary to condition his mind. If the intermediate page says for example “It’s an offer that will never happen again and the offer is valid until tonight …” the sense of urgency increases. This way of doing things is different from just showing a product and its price … through this page we put forward the arguments of “why it’s great” we must excite the desire to buy.

Read full post prestashop landing page thirtybees landing page