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PrestaShop is an excellent e-commerce platform that can help you turn your site into a profitable business. And it turns out that many good practices, such as those sometimes mentioned on the platform’s e-commerce blog itself, require you to enrich your online store with new features. The solution? PrestaShop addons!
Good news: the open source nature of PrestaShop means that there are many addons available to enhance its functionality. This will not only make your store more efficient, but also give you access to new possibilities that were not natively available on PrestaShop.
In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the features that can be added to your store using addons, and what they do. Warning: before adding any of these features, it is important to ensure that they are compatible with the version of PrestaShop that you are using. This information can usually be found in the module description.
PrestaShop addons to optimize natural referencing (SEO)
A module to manage meta tags intelligently and automatically
At the risk of breaking open doors, it is important to remember that good natural referencing is essential for any e-commerce site. This is one of the main levers for attracting customers and increasing sales.
However, there are several modules that will allow you to optimize the natural referencing of your PrestaShop store.
For your onsite SEO, a module such as Easy SEO allows you to easily manage your Title & Descriptions tags. If you have a very large product catalog, don’t panic! The module allows you to use variables to fill in the META tags of your pages automatically. Finally, it offers the possibility of modifying the ALT tags of your images.
An Addon to request indexing as soon as a new page is published / modified on your online store
A module such as IndexNow allows you to send your pages to search engines as soon as they are visible on your online store. This is essential because, without indexing, a page simply cannot be visible to search engines.
In addition, accelerating indexing is also an issue for updating the information that appears on search engines. If you change the price of a product, for example, you must request a new indexing of the modified page so that the search engine, if it displays the price in its search results, displays the correct information to Internet users.
Create an XML sitemap of your site: yes, but not just anyhow
Another practice often employed by SEO specialists is to create a sitemap. This makes it easier for search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing to index your pages.
Again, there are add-on modules that automatically generate a sitemap for your online store. You still need to be able to filter the pages you send in your sitemap, to focus the discovery of Google’s spider bots on URLs that are really worth indexing.
There is an advanced sitemap module that gives you a lot of flexibility and control over which pages to include in your sitemap. Its name is “Advanced Op’art sitemap”.
The essential PrestaShop addon: a module that allows you to easily manage 301 redirects on your PrestaShop site
An online store lives. URLs are created, others disappear, constantly, according to product assortments, event sales, stock availability… Although all these changes are legitimate, they can taint your natural referencing.
Indeed, search engines will tend to downgrade sites that have too many error pages. To remedy this problem, it is therefore essential that you make 301 redirects of your URLs that have been deleted. This is also an essential step when deleting a product or category.
It’s a way of saying to Google: “this page has changed its address”.
There are paid PrestaShop redirect modules, which allow you to easily create and manage 301 redirects on your site for less than 50 euros.
Add a FAQ to your product sheets to enrich their semantics
Search engines feed on content and words. In addition to defusing your customers’ most frequent objections upstream, adding an FAQ to your product sheets can therefore help your natural referencing.
The PrestaShop “Product FAQ” module will allow you to create, in a dedicated tab, a FAQ for each of your products. You can create as many questions as you want, but also link your questions to one or more products to make your life easier. The addon also gives you the possibility to order the questions in the order that suits you best, and to make answers rich thanks to the addition of HTML in your answers.
PrestaShop addons to improve e-commerce conversion rate
Install a module to add videos to your product sheets
Displaying videos on your product sheets directly improves your conversion rate. When you display a video on your listing, customers are more likely to buy. It’s a great way to make sure people have all the information they need before making a buying decision.
Indeed, they can see how the product is used and how it looks in reality. The videos are also very useful for people who want to get more information about the product before making a buying decision.
The good news is that you can easily add videos to your listings with the help of PrestaShop addons. There are many modules that allow you to display videos on your store, such as the free “Product Video” addon.
The Trusted Shops add-on for verified customer reviews
Customer reviews are key to improving trust in your products and brands. In fact, the more reviews you have, the more likely you are to increase your sales. This is why sellers should encourage their customers to leave reviews and rate their products.
Trusted Shops is a trusted online platform that helps e-tailers get verified reviews from their customers. Trusted Shops also offers a PrestaShop module that allows you to display validated customer reviews directly on your site, which increases buyer confidence and therefore sales!
Offer several payment methods to limit cart abandonment with this PrestaShop addon
When it comes to closing a sale on your site, it is generally a good idea to offer several payment methods to let the buyer choose the method that suits them best. You can offer your customers the choice of several credit cards, PayPal and even cryptocurrencies.
The more payment methods you offer, the greater the chance that a customer will complete their purchase on your site. In fact, research has shown that offering multiple payment methods increases conversion by up to 26%.
It turns out that different PrestaShop modules can be useful to you in order to diversify the means of payment on your site:
- The Stripe addon directly offers your customers the possibility of paying by credit card. It is a secure payment solution, and easy to integrate on its site.
- PayPal has created a free official module that can be installed on your PrestaShop store. The addon is free, and you pay a fee for each transaction made through Paypal.
- If your average basket is high, it may be interesting for some customers to offer payment in installments by check. Modules exist to offer this payment option on your site.
PrestaShop Addons for Marketing and Loyalty
The popup: a must for conveying important messages on your online store
By default, PrestaShop does not offer a popup module, although this feature has been widely democratized on most online stores. Indeed, it remains an effective way to clearly display your important messages.
Adding a popup module will therefore allow e-merchants to display a small window on the screen of their visitors. This window can contain text, images and even a video. It usually contains an offer or a call to action that can benefit both you and your customers.
- a time-limited promo code,
- benefits of subscribing to your newsletter,
- an exclusive promotion that can only be found on your site,
- a bonus gift for new customers,
- etc
Modules like “Planned popup” will also allow you to finely manage the trigger rules :
- depending on the pages visited by the user,
- the time of year,
- the state “logged in” or not of the visitor,
- the time he spent browsing your site,
- etc
Increase your average shopping cart by using cross selling PrestaShop addons
If used effectively, cross-selling can have a dramatic effect on your average basket.
For example, if you sell shoes and bags, it makes sense to offer your customers the option of buying both products at the same time. They will be able to take advantage of your promotional offers and save money. Cross-selling can also be used on an individual basis: for example, if someone buys a pair of shoes online, offer them a discount if they buy another item from your store.
To execute your cross-selling strategy well, choose a Prestashop module that gives you maximum freedom.
- For example, the possibility of adding several product selections on the same page (Mother’s / Father’s Day gifts; best sellers / new arrivals / trends; etc.).
- Or, that of finely managing the selection of products displayed for each selection of additional products.
This is precisely what this PrestaShop cross-sell and upsell module offers:
Add an add-on to expand its distribution on Amazon
Often, in addition to selling via its own store, an e-merchant will wish to extend its distribution on the Amazon marketplace. It’s an excellent idea when you know that Amazon is the 5th most visited site in France with 176 million monthly visitors. To do this, the merchant will have to integrate his online store with Amazon to synchronize the two sales channels.
This is what a module like Amazon Market Place offers to do, developed by a PrestaShop partner agency. Very complete, this module allows you to manage the synchronization of your catalog, the sending of invoices, the shipping rules, prices and many other things.
Set up a loyalty program thanks to an additional module
Promoting repeat purchases and retaining customers is essential in e-commerce, otherwise you risk exhausting your cash flow in acquisition.
One way to do this is to create a loyalty program that rewards customers with points for every purchase made. These points can then be redeemed for future purchases or certain benefits.
PrestaShop has modules specially designed for this purpose (eg All-in-One Rewards). They allow you to set up different types of reward programs and manage them easily from one place.
PrestaShop addons to improve your e-merchant productivity
Modules to easily create content blocks on your PrestaShop store
Sometimes, you need to customize the look and feel of your store by adding a block to display an advertisement, a promotional product, merchandising, a demonstration video, etc. The problem: not all of us are HTML and CSS geniuses, and sometimes adding simple extra content will take us hours.
An addon like “Multi HTML block” will allow you to create an infinite number of content blocks, which you can arrange as you wish on your site. Its text & HTML editor makes the creation of content blocks easy and accessible. And if you absolutely want to have advanced CSS functionalities to best match the image of your online store, the module offers you the possibility of modifying the CSS of each block independently.
Modules to change the position of products quickly
By default, PrestaShop offers a drag & drop system to reorganize its product categories. Although intuitive, drag and drop can quickly become slow and cumbersome (especially when you have dozens or even hundreds of products in a given category).
Additional modules, such as “Products order” allow you to indicate directly in your back office the desired positions for each product. No more need to drag your products one by one in the interface to reorganize your categories.
Easily generate & upload customer lists
In e-commerce, we often need to generate segmented customer lists, to send targeted emailing or to create specific audiences for Google Ads or Facebook Ads advertisements.
Be aware that there are free modules, like “Member Extract ”, which will allow you to filter your customer database with different criteria, then download it easily. We find in this module about fifteen search criteria, which makes it possible to carry out advanced segments of its customers. You can then download them in CSV format to be opened and edited in a spreadsheet.
Conclusion
As we have seen through these 17 additional modules, it is easy to implement good e-commerce practices on your PrestaShop site. You can now browse the PrestaShop blog without worrying about how you are going to implement their advice on your own site: the answer is often in the addons ?
Be careful though: PrestaShop is free software, so each time you install an addon or update it, there is no guarantee that it will work perfectly with other modules installed on your site by other developers… It is therefore important that you install addons for which you are sure to be able to benefit from technical support in the event of a malfunction.
