Discover How To Start Selling Digital Products WIth PrestaShop

matthewwoodward.co.uk http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/sell-digital-products-online-prestashop/

Start Your Digital Product Empire Today With Prestashop

One of the questions I see coming up on forums a lot is how to sell your own digital products online.

I’ve seen a range of crazy advice because there are a lot of moving parts like setting up a payment gateway andthe automated digital delivery system.

But today I’m going to show you just how easy it is to sell digital products online with the free PrestaShopEcommerce CMS system.

What You Will Learn

Why you should sell digital products

How to install & setup Prestashop

How to automate digital product delivery

How to customise the design of your store

How to add new features & functionality

The Benefits Of Selling Your Own Products

Owning & selling your own digital products online is a great way to make money. It ensures that you are in controlof everything and once you have created a digital product – you have unlimited stock to sell.

You can create digital products in any niche about any subject and you will spot the trend that every niche leaderhas their own free & premium products.

One of the simplest and best ways to make money online is to create your own product and sell it. Not only canyou create a product in every niche out there but making it in digital form means you have unlimited stock to sell.

My own product, Rank Cracker is software for analyzing competitor’s backlinks is completely free but it upsells tothis $97 product.

Since I’ve launched my free product, I’ve made over $21,000! If you’re convinced yet that you should create yourown product, Steve Brodsky wrote a guest post about his own product, The List Builders Academy which hasgenerated over $57,000!

Once you’ve created your own product, you need to establish a platform that makes digital e-commerce sellingeasy and we have Prestashop to do that.

Why Use Prestashop?

Prestashop is essentially the WordPress of the E-commerce world, it has a similar layout on the backend and isvery easy to work with.

You can customise everything easily with themes and modules which work much like plugins do in WordPress.

What makes Prestashop really cool though is its built in functionality to handle digital products and deliver themsecurely.

Prestashop is a 100% free software to build your very own e-commerce website. Some of the advantages of usingPrestashop are:

1. Manage multiple stores

2. Search engine friendly

3. Able to sell downloadeble products

A lot of e-commerce management software don’t let you sell downloadable products but Prestashop does. Let’stake a quick look at what it offers.

As you can see you can include many different details like price, color, social sharing buttons, pictures and more,giving us the best foundation to sell our product.

In the backend of Prestashop, they give you details on your orders, sales, traffic and things like that. You can alsoconnect your Google Analytics account for more data.

So with all of the functions Prestashop offers, it is the ideal software to set up your e-commerce website. It’s 100%free and has all of the appropriate features to sell a digital product.

Domain, Hosting & Installing Prestashop

To get started with Prestashop you need a domain & hosting. You can get that along with a 1 click Prestashopinstaller for $2.75/month with JustHost which is exactly what I did in the video below.

If you already have a domain & hosting see if Prestashop is available to install via your control panel and if notplease read the technical documentation.

If you’ve already got your hosting and domain set up, then all you need to do is install Prestashop which is reallyeasy to do. All you need to do is:

1. Go into your hosting’s control panel

2. Find Mojo Marketplace and select One Click Installs. It’ll bring you to the marketplace’s section for One ClickInstall applications.

3. Select E-commerce on the left side menu and click on Prestashop

They’ll give you a bit of info about Prestashop so click on Install.

Then select which domain you want to install it on, configure some advanced features and agree to the terms andconditions. Once it’s completed, it will take you to a new page that gives you the practical information of your newPrestashop site which you can log in directly from there.

You can login to your Prestashop site using the admin username and password you set up earlier and see that thedummy data has been loaded in there already. Now we’re ready to set up our theme, customize it to our personaltaste and get it all set up!

Configuring Prestashop

Once you have installed Prestashop we need to go through the basic settings and make sure everything is setupas we need.

Don’t worry if you are not sure what some of the settings do as I will explain each of them as we go!

After you’ve logged into your Prestashop account, take a quick look around just to get familiar and see how it’s set

up. After you’ve done that, head over to Modules.

There are a good handful of modules needing to be updated so head up to the right hand corner and click “UpdateAll.”

Getting rid of the dummy data

Now when Prestashop was installed, it loaded a bunch of dummy data in there which we need to delete so we canaccurately see the stats for our products.

Go into your dashboard, scroll down and look for Live Demo on the right hand side. Tick the bar so that the demomode is off and you should see all the graphs and data go to zero.

Let’s go back into Modules and Modules again. In the Search bar look for Database Cleaner which we’ll use todelete the preloaded data.

Install the cleaner and it’ll bring you to a screen warning you about what you’re going to do. Since we need to getrid of all the dummy data, go through and delete information for catalog, orders and customers.

Make sure to also check and fix the integrity constants since we did delete a ton of info so do that and also click theoptimization.

Now our catalog is nice and empty!

We can now move onto customizing our preferences.

General Preferences

So now head on over to Preferences and go down to General so we can configure some of the settings in there.Most of them you can leave at default but you can enable SSL here if you want to, just make sure to get acertificate from your hosting provider. The important one to change is the main shop activity to be Download.

After you hit save, go down to Orders. For my personal preferences, I prefer to change them to one page checkoutand to enable guest checkout, that way customers don’t need to make an account before purchasing which can killconversions.

The next one to look at is Products. You’re able to change the catalog mode, choose where to redirect customersafter adding products to a car and set yes to to Force Update of friendly URLs which is important for SEO.

In the Pagination section, you also have the option to choose the number of products displayed per page, to showthe amount of products in stock which is not relevant to us since we’re selling a digital product and the rest can beleft at default.

Hit save and let’s move onto customer settings.

For customer settings, I usually turn the mandatory phone number off and to enable sending an email afterregistration. That’s about all there is and hit save.

Come into SEO and URLs and you’ll see a whole list of our pages that we created and you can change the titlesand URLs here if you need to. For now, we want to go down to the Settings section and change the drop down toredirect to the canonical URL to 301 Moved Permanently.

At the bottom you can also make a robots.txt file to help Google point to the correct site maps on your site.

The next page to look at is the CMS options which includes the static pages. We’re going to leave them at defaultnow but you can change it later on if you need to.

Next up is images. Default settings are good for now but this will be where to go if you need to regeneratethumbnails or edit your photos.

Now let’s move on to Store Contacts to manage your stores if you have more than one of them but that won’tmatter to us being a digital store, so select all the ones in there and hit delete. Tick the box to turn off the display inthe footer and hit save.

Next up, the search section. Go ahead and delete all of the references to previous searches and the rest of thesettings can be kept at default.

The next section is Maintenance which we don’t need to do much here. All it is is choosing when to turn on and offthe shop which is handy if it’s live and you’re doing some work on it but as we don’t need to deal with that rightnow, let’s leave it as on.

Last is geolocation. If you want different versions of your website to be shown to various countries, you can changeit by IP address here.

Advanced Settings

We’re not done yet with settings, before we move on I want to show you a few of the advanced settings. Once oursite is live, there are a couple things we can do to improve the overall performance. Under Advanced Parameters,click on Performances and scroll down to the CCC section.

We want to turn all these options on and also tick the box to use cache. Important! Only turn these functions onwhen the website is completely done.

Creating Your First Product

Now that we’ve got all our basic settings configured, we can add our very first product. Go to Catalog and click onProducts. In the top right corner you will see Add New Product so click on that.

I’m going to use my product Rank Cracker for this example and this is the type of information you’ll be entering:

1. Type of product

2. Name of product

3. Condition of product

4. Visibility

5. Description

6. Price

There’s also an option to set up tax rules if necessary but we don’t need to bother with that right now. Click Saveand Stay to save the product into the database. Let’s fill out the SEO part.

Under SEO, you can enter in a meta title and meta description.

Fill those out and click Save and Stave again. Now we can go to the Associations part under Products where we

assign a category to our product. Select Create New Category and it’ll take you to the Category page.

For Rank Cracker, I’m going to define it as a software and enter in a short description but there are other thingsyou can add like meta keywords, description and image to your product which you can do so if you wish.

Hit Save and it’ll save our new category. Now we need to include that in our products so go back to Products andclick Edit. Then select Associations and click Expand All to find the new category we just added. Set that as thedefault category and hit save.

Moving onto quantities.

Earlier we had disabled stock management in the basic set up so you want to see “Stock management is disabled.”

Now the Virtual Product section.

The software we’re using for this example is Rank Cracker which is a software for Windows. If you’re not sure

what this is asking, for example if you were selling an e-book, your associated file would be a PDF file.

For Rank Cracker, I’m going to include the installer file and enter the following information:

1. Number of downloads allowed

2. Expiration date

3. Number of days the file can be accessed by the customer

All these preferences are up to you so click save once you’re happy with the settings.

The next section is Image where you can upload an image to go along with your product. This includes the coverimage and additional images the customer can look at. To change the priority of the images, just drag the imagesaround as you want it.

So those are the main options we need to set up for a digital product. The rest of them like Features andCustomization allows you to provide more information about the product as needed but since we don’t need them,we can leave them like how they are.

To give you a better example of what our website will look like, I added two more dummy products to our list.

You can see they’ve been added to the homepage and if you click on it, you’ll see all the information we enteredearlier including the image, price, and description.

Now we know how to add our products! Almost done setting up our e-commerce website.

Setting Up Payment Gateways

Now that we’ve entered some products and set up our basic settings, we can set up our payment method for ourPrestashop site.

There are several payment services on Prestashop but for this tutorial I’m going to install Paypal. To install Paypalgo to Payments, Gateways and then click Paypal.

Click Install and it’ll go ahead and do that. When it’s done, we have to pick the Paypal checkout service for our sitesince there are a few different options.

Paypal standard is free and the way it works is that a customer will add an item to their cart, click checkout and betaken to the Paypal checkout page. They’ll need to log in to Paypal and make the payment on their site andafterwards they will be redirected to your website.

However, if you want the checkout procedure to happen on your site, that will cost $5 and that is Paypal paymentsadvanced.

After you’ve chosen your method, enter your API settings but make sure to do it in test mode first to make sureeverything runs smoothly. When you are sure, you can select live mode.

Click Save and head over to the Payment section.

This is where you can choose which types of payment sections to allow on your site such as bankwire or payment

by check. Go through and select which ones you want to be enabled and disabled by clicking the drop down andselecting Disable.

One thing we need to fix is the country selection in the checkout section as it shows just the United States. To fixthis, go over to Localization and select Countries and a whole list of countries will come up. Scroll to the bottom todisplay all the results, select all and click Enable Selection and Apply. Now all the countries are there in thecheckout process!

Themes & Design Customisation

Now we can spend some time customising the look and feel of Prestashop store. I will show you how to downloadand install themes but be sure to checkout the links to the free themes below.

Then I will show you how to customise the default theme to your hearts content.

Free Prestashop Themes

You can find a range of free Prestashop themes here-

iKon – Featured in the tutorial from the official forums.BlackHawk – Responsive theme from the official forums.PrestaDevelop – Lots of free Prestashop themes to choose from.PrestaShop Forums – The official free themes forum.

Similar to WordPress, you can choose which theme you want to use in Prestashop and there are many free onesyou can find by Googling or looking in forums. To install a new theme, you need to download the theme’s zip file,click on Themes in the Dashboard and select Add new theme.

Add the file you downloaded and hit Save for it to upload and install the theme. When it’s done, you’ll see thetheme now uploaded in your Dashboard and to use it, all you have to do is hover over it and click Use this Theme.

It’ll ask you to look at some modules which we’ll talk about in a second and the next page will have you regeneratethumbnails. Click Go to the thumbnails regeneration page, scroll down and click Regenerate thumbnails.

If you go to the homepage of our website, you can see our new theme in our Prestashop. So let’s see how we cancustomize it to our liking.

Go to Themes and you can go through the Advanced Settings or click through the tabs to change icons, logos andthings like that but for this tutorial I’m going to re-install our previous theme and configure that for you to see.

Uploading a new logo

To upload your new logo, go to Themes under Preferences and you’ll see a tab for Logo in the Configure YourTheme Section. Click Add File, upload your file and click save.

How to change the image boxes

To change some of the boxes on the homepage, click on Modules and go to the Theme Configurator. You’ll seeseveral different options to change but let’s check the image banners first.

Scroll down until you see the preloaded images which we want to change and click on Edit to enter the informationfor our own images such as size, the link and title.

Once you click Save, you can refresh the site to see that our new images are there. So now we can go ahead andchange the slider once you changed the image boxes.

To change the slider, go back to Modules and select Installed Modules and Enabled Modules. A good thing toremember is that in this section there are lots of options to change for the images and other customization optionsso this is where you will do that when you need to.

So go down to Image Slider and click Configure which will bring you to a new page to upload a new slider image.

You can delete, disable or edit the images that are already there. You can edit the image and change the text, thetarget URL, title, caption, and description.

Once you change the slider images to how you want, you can go in and change the banner block too. So go backinto Modules, Installed and Enabled Modules and click on Banner Block.

Upload your picture, enter the banner link and description and then hit save.

If you don’t want to have a top banner at all, you can disable it. Come to Preferences, Themes and click on ThemeConfigurator. You can scroll down to where it says Display Top banner and tick that to No.

Let’s check out the images below the product list. Since this is a tutorial, I’m going to go ahead and delete all ofthem. To do that, go back to Theme Configurator and go down until you see the images we want to delete. Like theother images we went through earlier, we can edit them, disable or delete them.

Now we can update our Facebook page so head back to the Theme Configurator and select Configure underDisplay Facebook block. Enter your Facebook page’s URL and hit save.

To customize the text blocks you see next to the Facebook plugin, go back to Theme Configurator and selectConfigure under Display the Custom CMS information block. You can actually disable these boxes if you want.

Click on Edit to change the text and hit save.

To configure some other settings like your contact information and social media networks, you can do all that in theTheme Configurator. Like before, you can edit or disable it.

So once you’re done with that, we can change our header navigation. Go back to Modules, Installed Modules andEnabled Modules. Click on Configure under Top Horizontal Menu and you’ll be brought to a page like this.

The header navigation will allow our pages to be in auto navigation so we can add some categories, links to otherpages and add a search bar.

Once you’re satisfied with the changes, click save and refresh the page to see the changes. Next we can makesome changes in the footer.

Go back to Modules, Installed and Enabled Modules and select Configure for CMS Block.

Some things you can change in the footer are links to home page and what information to display.

Now the last thing to do is to change the dummy content that’s been loaded in like about us and delivery page. Sohead back to Preferences and click on CMS option to select which page you would like to change.

On the delivery page we have even more options to change. You can change the meta titles, description, contentand things like that. Hit save once you’re done.

Extensions & Modules

There are a huge range of modules to choose from that make it easy to create Google Shopping data feeds, addGoogle Analytics Ecommerce tracking, add rich snippets and so on.

Prestashop modules are similar to the plugins in WordPress. To find modules to install, click on Modules andThemes Catalog and you can look through different modules such as Amazon Marketplace and Abandoned CartReminder Pro.

These are some of the modules I’ve personally chosen to use.

1. Google Analytics E-Commerce PHP Module which integrates Analytics and Prestashop tracking analysis.

2. Google Rich Snippets which adds the core rich snippets like the ones you see in my review articles.

3. SEO Expet Module is good but not absolutely necessary since Prestashop has their own SEO setup.

Be sure to also check out the module for the email newsletter you use to integrate that into your Prestashop site.

To install a module, click on Module and in the top right corner you will see Add a new module. Click that andupload the zip file of the module you downloaded earlier.

Free Prestashop Modules

You can find a range of free Prestashop modules here-

Official Modules – Choose from a range of free official modules.PrestaDevelop – Lots of free Prestashop modules to choose from.PrestaToolBox – Offer a range of free modules for you to use.PrestaShop Forums – The official free modules forum.

My Sample PrestaShop Store

To help you follow the tutorial a bit better and understand how everything fits together I will keep the demo site thatI built in the tutorial live.

Feel free to use it as a reference if you get stuck-

Visit the live demo site

WARNING: Steal Your Competitors Search Rankings, Traffic & Income

Wrapping It Up

So there we have it – everything you need to know to be able to make a website with PrestaShop and start sellingdigital products online step by step.

Once you have your store and products setup always be sure to make a couple of test transactions to ensureeverything is working properly and the digital delivery system is doing its job.

You also want to make sure you have enabled all of the caches in the Advanced Parameters > Performancesection to improve site speed and load time.

At this point you now know everything to be able to setup your own Prestashop and tweak it to your hearts content

with new themes & modules.

Disclaimer: This post was sponsored by Prestashop. When I sell a sponsored post people are purely buying mytime to look at something and not my opinion. If the buyers product/services performs poorly in tests I will publishthat without refund. If you want to learn more about my sponsored post requirements please read this. You canview the live site I built in this tutorial here.