Page History

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• (name of your shop): from any page, takes you back to your Dashboard.
• Cart icon: opens a tooltip presenting the new orders since you clicked that icon. A red tooltip indicates the number of new orders. From there on, you can either display one of the new orders, or go to the list of orders.
• People icon: opens a tooltip presenting the last registered customers. A red tooltip indicates the number of new customers. From there on, you can either display one of the new customers, or go to the list of customers.
• Speech bubbles icon: opens a tooltip presenting the last customer service message. A red tooltip indicates the number of new messages. From there on, you can either display one of the new messages, or go to the list of messages.
• Search field with "Everywhere" dropdown list: allows you to search within the content of your shop – even within your administration page, if you can't remember where an option is set.
• Quick Access: this is the quick links menu, presenting the most useful links, as set in the "Quick Access" option of page under the "Administration" tabmenu.
• (your name): a simple reminder of which account you are currently logged-in with.
• "My Preferences" link: takes you to your account's preferences page, where you can set some personal options (for instance, the back-office language or your password).
• "Logout" link: logs you out of the current user account.
• "View My Shop": opens a new browser tab with your shop's front-end.

The

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menus

All along your daily activities administrating your shop, you will have to browser through the many pages and options of the back-office. Each tab menu applies to a given set of tasks:

• Catalog: This is the heart of your shop, where you will add products, create categories, set up carriers and suppliers...
• Orders: Once clients start adding products in their carts, you will start seeing orders in this tabmenu, with the resulting invoices. This is also where you handle merchandise returns, credit slips and per-order customer service, among other things.
• Customers: Here you can access all the information about your clients, and edit their addresses, create groups of customers to which you can apply special discounts, handle customer service, and even manage account genders if need be.
• Price Rules: A very specific tabmenu, enabling you to easily create vouchers and price reductions through a set of rules.
• Shipping: Everything pertaining to carriers and shipping costs.
• Localization: Helps you localize your shop with local values, such as language and translation, currency, units, taxes and tax rules, and geographical entities (regions, countries, etc.)
• Modules: Extend the power and usefulness of your shop by adding and activating modules, a hundred of them being available by default, and many more to buy on the Addons marketplace. This is also where you handle themes, and where modules' blocks get positioned on the theme. One last tab option menu page enables you to apply global settings to payment modules.
• Preferences: PrestaShop is a very configurable e-commerce solution, and you can edit just about any of its behaviors using the full-featured preferences.
• Advanced Parameters: Contains links to tools and informational pages that are too specific to fit in other tabsmenus, such as the Web service settings, the database backup tool, or the performance page, among others.
• Administration: Here are the settings pertaining to the back-office itself; for instance, the content of the Quick Access menu, the employees list and permissions, or the tab menu order, among others.
• Stats: Gives access to all the numerous statistics and graphics that are gathered and generated by PrestaShop.
• Shops: PrestaShop 1.5 enables you to handle many shops with a single installation of the solution. You can create as many as needed, group them, and assign them to specific URLs on your domain.

These are the default tabsmenus. Note that modules can add new tabsmenus, add new pages to the existing tabsmenus, and even new options to the existing pages.

Also, two menus are only available when the proper options are set:

• Stock. This menu gives you access to a

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• whole new feature of PrestaShop 1.5, where you can handle warehouses, stock movement and supply orders.
  It can be made available through the

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• "Products" preference page: activating the "Enable advanced stock management" option (in the "Products stock" section).
• Shops. This menu gives you access to

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• another new feature of PrestaShop 1.5,

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• which enable you to manage several online shops with a single installation of PrestaShop.
  It can be made available through the "General" preference page, by activating the "Enable Multistore" option.

All the default standard menus, including the "Stock" and "Shops" menus, are explained in depth in this user guide.

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Let's now explore the content of the Dashboard itself. It can feel crowded to first-time user, but you will find it gives an excellent summary your shop's daily at a glance.

The left column

The first element on the left is the introduction video and text. As a first-comer, we strongly advise you to watch the video, as it will serve as a quick visual guide to necessary steps to go through before opening your shop. We'll go into more details in the "Preparing your shop" section below. Once you have viewed the video, you can free some Dashboard real-estate by ticking the "Do not show again" checkbox.

Below the introductory video and text are a This column starts with a handful of quick links, which lead to some of the most useful pages at this stage of your exploration of PrestaShop. These buttons should help you get going with your daily task quicker, as they are some of the most accessed features of PrestaShop.
Two partner banners close the section.

The left column It ends with 4 boxes, two giving you information, the other two being links to external content.
The most interesting box at this stage is the "Configuration checklist" box, which displays seven key settings that should be taken care of for a healthy shop, written in color which indicates their status: green for "OK", yellow/orange for "advices", red for "must be done". We will explore this box in details in the "Preparing your shop" section below.
The "PrestaShop Links" box gives you useful links to this very user guide (online edition), its paper edition and the documentation site itself, along with links to the community forums and the Addons website, where you will be able to buy and sell modules and themes.
The "PrestaShop News" box gives you the latest news about PrestaShop, from the official blog.
Finally, a box is dedicated to a message from our partners.

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Your shop is meant to earn money, and this can only become a reality if you use at least one payment module. 13 modules are already available in the default install, which you can install and configure (from the "Modules" page under the "Module" menu, in the "Payments & Gateways" module section). Many payment modules require you to first set up an account on the service they were built for.

See the "Managing Payment Methods" & Gateways" section of the "Making The Native Modules Work" chapter of this guide in order to learn about them all.

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Products sold on your shop must be shipped to your customers – unless you only sell downloadable products, in which case the "Shipping" tab menu will be of little use to you.

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Note: Merchandise return is not enabled by default. If you want to allow your customers to return products and get a refund or a voucher, you can do it in the "Merchandise return (RMA) options" of the "Merchandise return" page, under the "Orders" tabmenu.
Merchandise return is explained in the "Managing Orders" chapter of this guide.

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There are many themes to choose from on the PrestaShop Addons marketplace: http://addons.prestashop.com/en/3-templates-prestashop.

You can also choose to create your own theme, or have it created for you by a developer. Refer to the online Designer Guide for help, at http://doc.prestashop.com/.

Once your theme is installed, you should explore it fully in order to know it by heart and be able to help customers out of a situation.

You can and should customize some of the theme's aspects, most notably its logo in various situations (header, mail, invoice, ...). This is done using the "Themes" preferences page, which you can find under the "Preferences" tabmenu.

Choose your modules

PrestaShop comes bundled with more than a hundred modules. These are very varied: analytics, front-office features, payment, shipping... You should explore the available modules in full, in order to know which ones you might want to enable, and which you'd rather keep disabled.

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To edit these pages, go to the "Preferences" tabmenu, click the "CMS" optionspage, then choose the page you want to edit, or create new ones.

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