Our thirtybees webshop is live!

[lunika]

Let me first introduce myself. My name is Bart and I’m the proud owner of a web shop that sells running shirts with funny texts: https://www.trackmyback.nl (sorry for the Dutch).

Yesterday the shop went live based on thirtybees version 1.0.1 and with this post I would like to share my quest with this great fork of Prestashop.

The beginning The first version of the shop was built with Woocommerce, a plugin for the popular Wordpress platform. After some time I found out that there were a lot of limitations and for almost everything (even simple e-commerce functionality) an extra plugin was needed. I decided to look for a different solution and switched to Magento. Although Magento is dedicated e-commerce software, version 2 was very unstable and version 1.9 had a lot of complexity in it. That lead me to Prestashop, because the demo was exactly what I needed and almost all functionality I needed was out-of-the box.

Thirtybees When starting a new shop I had to make a choice between version 1.6 and the new 1.7 version. While I tended towards 1.7 I found out that it contained a lot of bugs and some plugins I needed for payment or accounting were not compatible. But version 1.6 also contained a lot of bugs and browsing through the forums I learned that it can take long time before issues are solved. In one of the posts thirtybees was suggested and I decided to look into that. The strategy and the changes in thirtybees were really to my linking and I haven’t regret this choice. Cudos to the developers! One very big advantage was the SEO friendly url’s without the ID’s so that made switching from my old Magento shop a breeze!

Theme The theme I used for the shop is PTS Strollik, a single-product theme. It turned out to be fully compatible with thirtybees, but their Prestashop 1.7 version is more cleaner. I made some customizations to adapt to my shop.

Plugins I don’t use a lot of plugins, but the ones I needed were fully compatible with thritybees:

• Siel Acumulus (accounting) • Mollie (payment) • Dynamic product (for add-on pricing to customizations) • Local stock synchronizer (sync stock between products) • Content Box (create a block with custom content)

Hosting Because also the hosting contract was about to expire I moved from Siteground to Clouwdays. Cloudways has default support for thirtybees, is fast and has some nice caching (Redis) options.

Conclusion I am very happy with thirtybees as platform of the shop and I can’t wait to further explore all the possibilities. Until now I have had great support from the community with a question and a bug report. There is still a lot to optimize such as SEO and pagespeed improvements. That will be my goal for the short term. A big thank you to the community and developers, thirtybees is awesome!

Bart

[alwayspaws]

@lunika Welcome to thirty bees, Bart! Your experiences and decisions to come to thirty bees is very well written and will help others to make the switch.

We are very happy you are part of our team!

Kudos to you for making the right decision!

Stephanie