A shopping cart is an internet based program that allows retailers to categorize and display their items online while providing customers with everything from product details, checkout and payment integration. Over the past ten years I have worked with several shopping carts, some that are a great pleasure to work with and others that I wouldn’t suggest to anyone. Shopping carts can cost anywhere between free and several thousand dollars. I’m going to be discussing one in particular, Virtuemart for Joomla. Why you may ask, well it’s free for one and the Joomla architecture allows for scalability. Joomla what? What is Joomla? A brief explanation is that Joomla is an open source content management system that allows web designers to build different websites around the same software. It’s no nonsense backend allows administrators to manage their website with a click of a button. I will discuss more about Joomla in my next article, for right now; we are talking about shopping carts.
Virtuemart is an open source program as I mentioned above, your cost of operation is really just your webhosting. So for around 10 bucks a month, you’re in business. Other managed services like Yahoo, eBay stores and Volusion can cost three times that or more depending on the package you choose. Virtuemart offers all the bells and whistles you need to get your business online in a jiffy. Once the storefront was installed the only time consuming job is to enter in all of your products and upload photo. The software has several product layouts to choose from, so you can customize easily without any knowledge of programming. Unlike other open source shopping carts such as osCommerce, installing a custom template is as easy as 123.
Virtuemart is integrated with about a dozen payment processors such as PayPal and Authorize.net, shipping features are also limit less, allowing you to set shipping rates for all over the globe if needed.
I recently created a virtual storefront for a client, his budget was restricted and his time was limited, I suggested Virtuemart with Joomla. We had the site up and running within a week and stayed well within his budget.
Anthony Urso is a Charlotte web designer with over 10 years experience building simple to complex internet application for clients globally. For more information you can view his online portfolio at h
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