PrestaShop Authorize.net module now available (for a hefty price)
I have been watching the development of PrestaShop and it was showing a lot of promise. The long feature list, clean look and seemingly easy setup process really caught my eye. The one major missing component was support for one of the most popular payment processors in the U.S., Authorize.net. Last week I received an email from the PrestaShop team with a big announcement about support for Authorize.net. This was exactly what I had been waiting for and I was just about ready to make PrestaShop my e-commerce platform of choice. That excitement was short lived.
PrestaShop is free, open source software and I was hoping to install the module, take it for a test run and make sure everything worked properly. After following the link to the module I was shocked to see a big price tag and add to cart button. It was not the fact that they are charging for this module that struck me, it was the cost itself. They are asking 300.00 € before tax, 358.00 € with tax. That works out to a little bit over $512 US!!
I can understand if a developer wants to cover their costs for the hard work that goes into writing code, but $500 for a payment processing module is just outrageous. There are dozens of other open source carts out there that include the functionality for free right out of the box. Once you get into this price range (or in some cases less), there are plenty of commercial shopping carts available that come with full support from the developers. Why would I pay that kind of money for one payment module?
In my opinion this is just a way for PrestaShop to get money out of the large number of users that they know are interested in using Authorize.net and I have officially crossed them off of my list of possible low cost/free shopping cart solutions. I will be sticking with Zen Cart for now and continue to evaluate other carts as they come along. I have been evaluating X-Cart as another possible alternative and it looks very promising so far.
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I totally agree about the Authorize.net module, which is why I wrote my own version that I am selling in my shop Presto-Changeo (for $75 which is the same price for all the payment modules I write).I have many useful modules for Prestashop, like a filter module, a translation module (which I used to translate my site to 15 other languages), and an attribute wizard module that lets you customized your attributes similar to apple’s website.
I am also an English Moderator on the Prestashop forum, and I see many people that are far less tech savvy than me that manage to install and customize their own shops, and install themes, modules and modification with little or no help.
It is a very fast growing shopping cart solution, with a pretty helpful community (in the prestashop forum), I can't say I visit other shopping cart forums, but I think the majority of people that ask questions in the prestashop forum get answers (I know I try to help as many as I can...)