How to Create an online Store for Free Using PrestaShop and Openshift

The e-commerce industry is booming worldwide. The United States, the world’s largest e-commerce market, generated $395.28 billion in e-commerce sales in 2013 (internetretailer.com). This tip will present a step by step tutorial on how to setup your online store for free, the only skill you’ll need during the tutorial is your ability to use a web browser.

In previous “How to” a step by step tutorials were presented on how to create an online store using Magento and Openshift and OpenCart and OpenShift. This tutorial will present a step by step guide on how to create an online store PrestaShop as a commerce Management system and Openshift PaaS (Platform as a Service) as a hosting service, without further ado let’s start

Requirements

A free Openshift account, just go to Openshift website and register using your email, no credit card is required.

Steps

After registering; go to Openshift home page and click on the “MY APPS” on the top of the screen.
You’ll be directed to your log-in window and enter your credentials, you’ll be directed to a new window click on the blue “Create your first application now” link.
You’ll be directed to a window, select the “PHP 5.4” tab from the “PHP” menu.
You’ll be directed to a new window, in the public URL; type the name of the project/application name (e.g. MyShop, AmazonCart, etc.) in the first space and the domain name (it’s not your real domain name, just any identification name e.g. AwesomeGuy/AwesomeGal) in the second space.
Under the public URL, there’s the source code slot, just copy and paste the following link “https://github.com/PrestaShop/PrestaShop” and it should look like the screenshot below:
Now, you’ll have to select the region where your instance will be create (where the server is located) you should select it as close as possible to your potential customers just to increase loading speed nothing more then click on “Create Application” tab at the end of the page.
It will take a while then you’ll be directed to a new window, just click on the blue “Not now continue” link.
You’ll be directed to a new window where you should add MySQL just by clicking the blue “Add MySQL” link.
You’ll be directed to a new window, just click on the “Add Cartridge” tab.
You shall be directed to anew window where you shall find all of your “MySQL” credentials.
Now you’ll need to add phpMyAdmin; click on the blue “Add phpMyAdmin” located at the bottom of the same window.
You’ll then be directed to a new window to confirm the addition of phpMyAdmin, just click on the “Add Cartridge” tab.
You’ll be directed to the main window again and it’s time to go to your “PrestaShop Website” installation window, to do that simply click on the blue link at the top of the screen (that’s your URL).
You’ll be directed to the “PrestaShop” installation window.
First you’ll need to accept the license of agreement and then click on the “Next” tab.
You’ll be directed to a new window, where you should enter your credentials “name, email,shop name, etc.”.
You’ll then be directed to a new page where you should input the password, database username, database password”, you can get this data from step “10”. You should leave the database prefix field empty.
In that window, you should provide your database credentials, there’s a small trick here which is getting your database server IP, the easiest way to do so is to return to your application and click on the small arrow at the phpMyAdmin tab.
A new window will popup just copy the number shown in the below screenshot.
Paste that number in the database host field in the PrestaShop installation, then fill in the rest of the information from your database credentials that you can find in your application, then click next.
You’ll then be directed to a new window, just select the option to open store in your browser and it should look like the following screenshot.