Joomla! Discussion Forums

Aside from the iJoomla controversy, does anyone have any thought son VirtueMart as opposed to iJoomla Digistore? I heard iJoomla Digistore wasn't 1.5 compatible, but their site says they will be and I have had SOOOOOOOOOOO many problems with VirtueMart.
Any experiences would be appreciated!
Thanks!! 

Which controversy with iJoomla DigiStore are you referring to?

I've used numerous shopping carts and love Virtuemart. What issues are you having?

I don't think we are actually allowed to say stuff that is controversial on this forum. If interested, all the information is available with searching.
VirtueMart has been nothing but a headache to me. Love the fact it is free, love the functionality of Digistore. Love the fact VM offers so much, wish Digistore would offer more.
Hands down, the best for me so far has been Digistore, especially with the easy PayPal integration. 

As said before, what problems did you have with VM? I have used it on various projects with very little problems.

Alternatively, why don't you think of using a standalone shopping cart on a sub-domain of your site or something. Why do you need it to be plugged into Joomla?

Can't afford a stand alone cart, unless I am misunderstanding your comments. Even Digistore was a stretch, that's why I originally went with VM.
Vm gave me problems with shipping, wouldn't let a shipper be chosen, therefore sales could not complete. 

There are other OS shopping carts available if you can go stand alone.

OSCommerce for one.

Thanks

Hey Pinc

Digistore is a good, basic easy-to-use option but lacks more advanced features.

Virtuemart is the full on, bells-and-whistles solution and you're right ... can be difficult to use and customize

Magento is also an up-and-coming possibility although not Joomla-related.

Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for it! 

I purchased Digistore for a client (powerofthestones.com) thinking it would be easier to install and support than VM.  I thought this would be an easy store for my clients to use versus VM, ECJC and some of the others.  I was wrong.  This is a buggy, expensive product with very few features and poor support.

After getting it installed, the first thing you noticed is that PayPal is the ONLY payment processor installed (not even the IPN version, only basic PP) and no shipping module.  You have to calculate all shipping prices by hand and input it. That shocked me for the amount of money I paid for it because their marketing page is misleading here.  It doesn't say that you get a shipping module, it just eludes to it.

I installed the product and first thing out of the box is the pagination is broke.  It took them 3 months and another release (which I still haven't installed yet, read on) to fix it apparently.

Past the bugs and slow support, I basically rewrote about 20% of the one .HTML template page to get the site looking like my customer wanted. With the new release, they are telling me after many questions that they basically rewrote a lot of code and I will have to start over with the customizations.  So, now this product has cost me (since I do this for a living) a LOT of money.

It would have been a LOT cheaper (for me) to install VM and train the customer to use it instead of this product. Your paying for beta level code.  The software was originally written for them to sell their warez in-house and that influence is heavy.

I could write a long post on Pros and Cons but that is better suited for another place.  After this last go-round with their support, I just wanted to give people my opinion of their product and support ethics to date.

That's what I was looking for ~ opinions.
I appreciate your honest and candid reply. I will keep all this in mind as I continue my experiment.

After subscribing to this thread and reading the posts, I was inspired to look into Digi Store through the demo. Some of the basic functionality on the front end looks great, particularly as it allows you to turn content pages into shopping cart pages and perform the variety actions available to content pages. But after merely 10 minutes or so, reality began to set in. I was quite surprised on how weak the complete package was. While it did have a few good features I'd like to see in Virtuemart one day, which included some News Portal knockoff admin pages, I thought it was in alpha stage than prime time.

In the past, I have always had good support from iJoomla, though. I was bummed and perplexed when they dumped their old forum and replaced it with a new forum that had no posts imported from the old. Very odd. Lately, though, support hasn't seemed up to par with previous requests. I have been using the iJoomla News Portal and for the longest time have wanted a way to simply use the default Joomla section and category pages, since iJoomla pages change the URL for the default Joomla pages to "com_newsportal" in standard SEF, and with OpenSEF, the URLs are changed to "Section/Category" rather than "section/category," which is the way OpenSEF is configured. I was able to divert this issue, but after being told for approximately eight months this issue would probably be solved in the next version (many versions later), it only became worse and SE traffic has taken slight dive immediately after the upgrade.

I still support iJoomla, as they are reputable and have produced some cutting edge products, which may include the new ad server, but I am looking to move from News Portal, since I can make the page a lot lighter and cleaner by using one or more Mini Front Page modules combined with {mosload position} and no items published on the default front page. Thus far, I am very happy with the results on a few client sites.

I think you make some great points as to why people are frustrated with iJoomla.
When you have to pay this much money for an additional site function, in this case the shopping cart, you expect great service. This is probably due to the fact that VM is free as are many of the other great modules available for Joomla.
This really seems to be a judgment call as to whether the cart will work for you (editorial sense) or  not.
I do agree that support and features are light for the price. Forum is frustrating.
I want to also make the point that VM  support is also light, at least from the actual developer. If you can hunt through the forum, the support there is much better than iJoomla's forum however.

Hi Pinc
You may like this as I too am very sick of VM
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,246302.0.html

PS a lot of my work is based around VM as i build
http://www.virtuemartfrooglefeed.com

So you can tell how disheartened in it all i am.
Regards
Ian

Pinc, I too used VirtuMart, and still use it for one client, but it has flexibility limitations and stability issues (don't even try to use it on Joomla 1.5) that I can't afford to gamble with.  VM even says on their own site that they are not Joomla 1.5 compliant and won't be until it has been released (which is acceptable, . . . but how long would I have to wait before it became "stable" on 1.5?)

I use a company called UltraCart. (http://www.ultracart.com). 

Why?  The flexibility is endless.  Stability is rock solid.  I can create a "special deal" for one unique customer and send them a link to make purchase . . . . . you can't do that with VM.

It does cost about $39 a month for under 50 store items, and then like $54. for up to 250 store items or something like that, (please don't' quote me on that), however, it does not matter if you sell 1 item a month or 10,000, or 100,000 items per month . . it's still the same flat fee.  There are no hidden costs.  I have been using them for months. . . no contracts . . . and paying one monthly fee every month.

I also like that I can literally create a new product in 30 seconds.  You only have to worry about the link to the store, and the view cart link.  You do the rest. . . the look, etc, but that's easy.

Take a look at our site to see how we have used UltraCart.  I did all the work prior to actually seeing your item in the shopping cart itself.  They do everything else automatically, and instantly.

Their support untouchable.  I call them, and they are on the phone right away . . . . . every time. . . . and they are located in Georgia, USA . . . not from Pakistan with an accent that one from North or South America, or Europe can not understand . . . . if only DELL would learn this lesson.

Check out the following links from their site:

Features & Benefits
http://ultracart.com/whyultracart.html#1

Pricing:
http://ultracart.com/online-shopping-cart/pricing.html

Why am I going all out to explain this?  Partly because Joomla has completely changed my career, (Dreamweaver who? ;-), and also because I went the VirtuMart way, only to leave it and go UltrCart.  Let me know what you think.

Checked it out and it looks great, but alas I am super low on money. 
Has anyone heard of ShopStoreNow.com? 

I understand, however, when you are able to do so, I would highly recommend it.  You won't have the headache's and troubles and limitations that you have with VM.  A super quick way is to use PayPal Express . . . it's free . . . and you already have a PayPal account.  Hope this help.  Merry Christmas!

Thanks, I'll take all this into consideration. Your time is very appreciated>