2015 has been an amazing year for the eCommerce world. Numerous businesses ventured out and established their online presence. With 85 % of the world population shopping online, ecommerce industry is reaching new heights.
This surge has been driven considerably by the ease of establishing your online business presence. For creating an online store, you can now take your pick from a variety of options. Still PrestaShop stands out from the crowd because of its numerous features. An open source eCommerce platform with an active and wide Community providing support in multiple languages, variety of Add-ons to cater to your specific business needs – all these have spurred PrestaShop to become a giant in the open source ecommerce world. PrestaShop currently boasts of 250,000 active online stores in 65 languages with an open source community of 850,000 members spread across 209 countries and territories.
Let’s take a look at the wonderful year PrestaShop had.
- PrestaShop disrupts ecommerce industry with first free cloud
PrestaShop’s new year gift to the ecommerce world was the release of PrestaShop Cloud, the industry’s first and only free cloud ecommerce platform. This fully hosted and supported version allows e-retailers to create a new online store within a few clicks, thus removing the technical and financial hurdles which deter many SMBs.
January 29
- PrestaShop partners with LoyaltyLion
Loyalty programs are an incredible way for a merchant to increase customer engagement and repeat customers. PrestaShop partnered with LoyaltyLion to provide e-retailers an economical and customizable loyalty program. Through LoyaltyLion’s programs, merchants can design loyalty programs to award points for signups, purchase and referral.
February 10
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- PrestaShop partners with Brinks Checkout
PrestaShop announced its new partnership with Brink’s Checkout, a secure e-payment service provider, to help merchants from 197 countries sell securely. Using Brink’s, merchants from these countries can sell and accept payments in 26 currencies and 15 languages. Brink’s Checkout is Level-1 PCI Compliant and uses a 3-tier, 300-variable fraud prevention system to secure transactions. Brink’s will also help PrestaShop merchants to receive their online payments in as less as two days.
February 19
- PrestaShop launches eBusiness Plan Competition
PrestaShop introduced a eBusiness Plan Competition to encourage and support future online businesses. Anyone with an eCommerce business idea can apply for this and the five winners will receive personalized support from PrestaShop and a golden opportunity to jumpstart their businesses.
February 19
- PrestaShop integrates Olark LiveChat
PrestaShop partners with Olark, a live chat provider to allow customers to connect with merchants through live chat in a few clicks. This increases the merchant’s chances of converting that visit to a sale.
March 23
- Mailjet integrates with PrestaShop
PrestaShop joined hands with Mailjet, a powerful all-in-one email service provider, to allow its merchants to send all transactional and marketing emails directly from the seller account. This will improve brand loyalty and ROI insights. The Mailjet module can be accessed from PrestaShop Add-ons Marketplace or natively from within the PrestaShop install package.
April 8
- 230,000 PrestaShop online stores
At the end of Q1 2015, PrestaShop proudly reported a rise in its online stores, with 230,000 active stores running successfully. The launch of PrestaShop Cloud contributed significantly to this growth, with 50,000 new stores being created since its launch in January.
April 16
- PrestaShop Day – a celebration of ecommerce
PrestaShop Day, originally called PrestaShop Barcamp, was immensely successful with 2000 attendees and overwhelming support from the ever widening PrestaShop community. Knowledge on ecommerce was shared through various conferences, workshops, store analysis from PrestaShop experts. It was even popular enough to become the trending topic in France twice in a day.
June 11
- Love PrestaShop? Become its Ambassador
PrestaShop announced its Ambassador program to reward and support PrestaShop enthusiasts all over the world. By the end of 2015, 22 meetups were hosted to connect with hundreds, which resulted in 24 Ambassadors across 15 countries and 22 cities.
- $1 Million Developer Integration Fund
PrestaShop announced a $1 million Developer Integration Fund to promote innovative module development for PrestaShop Addons. Currently, more than 5,000 modules are offered to cover your specific business requirements 50 modules are currently under development and PrestaShop is still looking for more to fill in the technology gaps.
- EU Compliant features introduced
PrestaShop’s new version handles cross-border selling in the European Union by being automatically configured for multiple European markets, along with the rules and regulation of individual regions.
August 24
- PrestaShop partners with Alipay
PrestaShop announced its partnership with Alipay, China’s leading and most trusted e-payments service. This partnership will allow PrestaShop’s 250,000 e-retailers to tap into the booming Chinese ecommerce market replete with 642 million active Internet users and 565 million mobile users. The high demand for European products like baby, maternity, food supplements, etc makes China a lucrative market for European small and medium sized businesses (SMBs).
Alipay currently processes 50% of online transactions in China.
The Alipay Cross Border Online Payment module can be accessed from the PrestaShop Addons Marketplace and is already natively integrated to the PrestaShop back office.
17 November
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