History
PrestaShop started in 2005 as a student project within the EPITECH IT School in Paris, France. Originally named phpOpenStore, the software was first available in two languages: English and French. Three months after its launch, the project was translated into thirteen languages.[citation needed]
The company, PrestaShop SA, was founded in 2007 by Igor Schlumberger and Bruno Lévêque.
Between May 2010 and April 2012, PrestaShop grew from 17 employees to more than a hundred. In 2011, it established a secondary headquarters in the United States in Miami.[3][4] As of April 2016, PrestaShop has over 120 employees and offices in 6 countries.[5]
In March 2014, PrestaShop SA secured $9.3M in Series B Funding to continue its global expansion efforts.[6]
In January 2015, the company launched PrestaShop Cloud, a free self-hosted version of its software,[7] but at least since 2017 is no longer available.[8]
The 1.7.x branch of PrestaShop was first released as a stable version in November 2016.[9]
Initially, maintenance for the 1.6 version was planned to expire in October 2018. For various reasons, PrestaShop decided to extend this maintenance period until June 30, 2019.[10]
PrestaShop has been built as a monolith following traditional object-oriented PHP practices. Originally based on a custom framework, it is progressively being migrated to Symfony.[11]
In February 2018, Alexandre Eruimy took over as CEO of PrestaShop. Since then, the company has been signing large-scale strategic partnerships with companies such as Paypal, Google, Meta, TikTok and many others, in order to make the latest technological solutions available to e-retailers.[citation needed]
In April 2019, PrestaShop reached 32% market share of all online shopping sites in France, according to BuiltWith.[12]
PrestaShop's worldwide marketshare of sites using open-source shopping cart software was 0.31% in October 2021 according to BuiltWith.[13] According to W3Techs's August 2023 report, 0.8% of the top 10 million websites worldwide are built using PrestaShop.[14]
In October 2019, PrestaShop closed the Miami headquarters and ceased its operations in the Americas.[15]
In 2019, PrestaShop received the Acteurs du Libre International Award[16] for its international development strategy.
A beta version of PrestaShop 8 was released in August 2022 along with a migration path from PrestaShop 1.7.[17] In October 2022, PrestaShop 8.0 was released.[18]
In November 2021, PrestaShop joined the MBE Worldwide group to accelerate its growth and become the leading commerce platform for accelerating business growth worldwide.[19]
Business model
As an open-source organization, PrestaShop is faced with the challenge of generating revenues. By leveraging the size and international scope of its open-source community, the company established two main sources of revenue:
- PrestaShop Addons, a marketplace through which merchants purchase custom addons and themes for their stores
- Strategic partnerships with e-commerce industry leaders such as PayPal or Google[20]
Features
PrestaShop has more than three hundred built-in features for managing product listing, payments, shipping, manufacturers and suppliers. PrestaShop uses a web template system that allows users to customize store themes and add new features through add-on modules. The PrestaShop Addons marketplace provides a platform for third-party developers to sell themes and modules to merchants.
Themes
PrestaShop provides a basic responsive theme by default. Users can install or develop their own themes that change the display of the website without altering its content.
Modules
Add-on modules extend the software's built-in functionalities. Users may install modules directly within the software administration panel or develop their own.
Partnerships
On June 14, 2021, Wish announced a partnership with PrestaShop to provide over 300k merchants with access to the Wish marketplace.[21]
