Currently business expands in Internet more and more. New resources offering products and services for sale appear every day. Therefore any self-respecting webmaster should be able to create high-quality e-shop. This article is dedicated to creating of e-shop using Joomla.

Use ready script for e-shop or create it from scratch?

This is the first question any webmaster or customer asked themselves. Use a ready script for e-shop or order its development from scratch? There is no well-defined answer. Both ways have their advantages and disadvantages. Let us consider this problem more detailed.

Creating E-shop From Scratch

Advantages:

1. Disposing highly qualified developers and sufficient budget you can create e-shop with unique design.
2. Due to its uniqueness e-shop becomes more secure. It is not profitably to spend means to crack such shop.

Disadvantages:

1. The main disadvantage is high costs for e-shop development. This is because the product should be developed, implemented and tested for possible errors. A whole team of professionals should be involved in this process.
   Some web-studios offer low price for development of e-shop from the scratch. Such proposals look deceptive. Most probably e-shop will be created on the basis of CMS or the studio developed its own script which is adjusted for a client.
2. If e-shop was created by low level specialists and not enough time was spent for testing critical errors can occur.

Summary: make sense to order the development for large companies which require non-standard functionality and high security of its e-shop. For the rest of customers, the best solution would be using of ready script which can be adjusted for the customer’s.

Using Ready Script For E-Shop

Advantages:

1. Script has low cost or is free which means that you will reduce expense for your site.
2. High functionality and security of e-shop.
3. Great number of additional extensions.
4. Good technical support (the most of your questions have answers on the specialized forums)

Disadvantages:

1. Popular scripts are subjected to attacks. However they are improved quickly owing that fact.
2. Unification of e-shop (such script is used for a great number of other sites; you cannot expect uniqueness of e-shop design).

Thus ready script will be right solution for small companies which require low costs for development and e-shop performance but do not need unique functionality and design.

Select a Script for E-Shop. Shop-Script or VirtueMart?

The second problem to be resolved by a webmaster is choosing a script for e-shop. There are two kinds of scripts: commercial and free. Shop-Scripts is commercial script (it does not concern to Joomla) and VirtuaMart is a free Joomla component.

They tell that quality of free e-shop is low. But this is not true. Sometimes you can meet shareware product that are not worse than their commercial analogous. The examples are Linux and Joomla.

Thus we need a free Joomla-powered component for e-shop. The most popular Joomla component is VirtueMart. Let’s talk about it.

VirtueMart Review

VirtueMart is free Joomla extension that allows easily creating of high-quality e-shop. virtuemart.net is the official site of this project. You can download there the latest version of the component and additional modules and plugins for it.

VirtueMart is intended for creating of small and medium e-shops. Any user who wishes to create e-shop can use this component for seling of his products.

Virtuemart Abilities

- Control for unlimited number of products and categories,

- The component can be used as e-shop as well as catalogue. You can even disable showing the prices.

- Selling of the uploaded products,

- Powerful control panel,

- Products import and export through CSV files only,

- Adding product images,

- Adding of product attributes (for example, size and color),

- Managing your clients in customers’ groups,

- Assigning a new prices for one product depending on a user group,

- Showing of price with taxes or without taxes (adjusted for every user group),

- Shop statistics includes new customers, new orders, etc.

- Managing inventory of goods,

- Notifying the customers about товара в наличии,

- Calculating of taxes in various areas (city/district and country/region),

- Managing of shippers and shipping methods,

- Using of API InterShipp, UPS or Canada Post Shipping.

- Full control over your orders including order history, editing order and customer notifications,

- Main report functions: sold products, monthly and yearly profit,

- Managing order statuses,

- Customers can add their own shipping addresses,

- Easy searching of products through search form,

- Your clients will be able to get know that the product is available again,

- Customers can view shipping date of the product with images,

- Customers can control their accounts (registration required),

- Client can view all his orders and order details,

- Order confirmation is sent by email to a customer and shop owner (optional),

- Control of different currencies, countries and regions,

- Using SSL-encrypting (128 bits),

- Quick processing of credit cards,

- Using of the following payment systems: uthorize.net®[http://www.authorize.net], eWay, Worldpay, PayMateand NoChex…,

- Using PayPal,

- You can add your own payment methods to your shop.

- etc.

So, make your choice!