Viperfish Media is the home of freelance Joomla designer and Joomla developer, John Pitchers. Based in Perth, Western Australia, John specialises in all aspects of Joomla website development.

With an e-commerce website your business is open 24-7 and can make sales even when you are not in the shop, as well as giving you access to a world wide market at minimal cost.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECommerce , e-commerce can be defined as “the buying, selling, marketing, and servicing of products or services over computer networks.”

With an e-commerce website your business is open 24-7 and can make sales even when you are not in the shop, as well as giving you access to a world wide market at minimal cost.

There are many companies offering the development of e-commerce facilities at various levels of complexity. Ecommerce web sites are usually built using predesigned yet customizable solutions which are stable and industry proven.  The product which I use and highly recommend is an open source product called Virtuemart. Virtuemart is the leading e-commerce system for use with Joomla or Mambo content management systems. Currently sitting at around 300,000 downloads and according to one estimate approximately 50,000 active online installations.

Designed for Online Merchants
Virtuemart truly is  a user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being constantly developed by a group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently. Some "solutions" seem to be complicated programming exercises instead of responding to users' needs. Virtuemart puts the merchant's and shopper's requirements first.

As Virtuemart is integrated into a content management system it means that e-commerce capabilities can blend in perfectly with an established web site. The shop can be just one component of a large web site incorporating forums, downloads, information, gig guides or multitudes of other components. Most other e-commerce solutions are stand alone applications and it can be very hard to add other components or even static web pages to this type of system. This is where Virtuemart and Joomla stand above the rest.

Virtuemart has proven to be one of the most popular choices for developers, merchants and shoppers. As a merchant, it is very easy to add a new product, upload an image or 2 or 3, and start taking orders. Similarly, it’s just as easy to delete old products, update, modify or change existing entries, change prices and payment methods and modify critical text like the checkout success page, privacy policy etc.

Designed for Online Shoppers
Virtuemart will deliver the ultimate online shopping experience to your customers. Navigating through your merchandise offerings is a breeze with Virtuemart, the program provides several "Spotlight" lists in addition to the traditional category to product links. Once a product is added to the shopping cart, secure checkout is a simple process. After providing the billing information, your customer chooses the shipping method. (Multiple shipping methods are built-in). Next, a payment type is chosen from one of the popular payment modules. (PayPal™ and AuthorizeNet™ are just 2 of the modules). Last, the customer reviews the order, shipping and payment choices, and confirms the order. You are immediately notified of the order and your customer automatically receives an e-mail confirmation.

In short Virtuemart is shopping cart software the way it should have been all along. A Google search for ‘powered by virtuemart' will give you thousands of examples of online shops which are quite literally “Powered by Virtuemart”. Take a look.