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I signed up to IXXO Cart 4 months ago and they agreed at the pre-sales stage that certain 3rd party plugins would work with it - although after installing it they did not work. I have been having various other issues with it as was having trouble with Virtuemart at the time. Now I have got passed these issues in VM i wish I had never got involved with IXXO Cart.

BE WARNED, they will take your money and sell to you fast but after that their support is absolutely dire and can take days to respond to support tickets for simple issues and at times have been slightly inappropriate with their language towards me.

I have asked for a full refund and termination of my license code but they will not do this and say its not their fault that I cannot get the IXXO Cart software to work the way I want it to work.

Id say stick with Virtuemart or other open-source software.

be careful.

active8, thanks for the feedback. Good to hear about your experience before spending a significant amount of money.

no problems, I have wasted a lot of money on this and for that, just rubbish support and when the support does come, its 2-3 days too late, I have a project that is currently several (3-4) months overdue due to the IXXO Cart problems. I was needing to integrate the Joomlaworks AllVideos Mambot plugin into a tabs/slides plugin on the product view on IXXO Cart - they said this would work when I talked to them on live chat at the pre-sales stage - then after purchase they told me this would not work. Lies!! This worked perfectly with VirtueMart without a hitch.

The reason I changed to IXXO Cart was because I could not display 2 seperate prices properly using attributes on VM but have since worked out how to do this. IXXO does not even have a customer forum for help which is also another negative thing about them.

When speaking to them on Skype Chat I received sarchastic comments from them about my joomla abilities like 'If I used my head, I might be able to work out how to do simple things'. That I thought was a very rude comment to make coming from what seems to appear as a professional joomla component company.

Under any circumstances, do not sign up with IXXO Cart, even if they tell you how much better it is than Virtuemart etc. You cannot bridge any 3rd party component, extensions, plugins with it. They say this is because its a secure component and cant run the risk of peoples shops being hacked due to insecure open-source software.

I feel like I have been played and by being told its my fault i can get stuff working is just real bad, I wonder if I have a case by taking this to PayPal to get a refund???

hmm

Hello

I have now given up on IXXO Cart. they have taken my money to develop a custom template and design and delivered it very late with lots of problems. After a year of trying to sort things out, threatning with lawyers, claimimg through Paypal etc etc. They are pretty nasty people, in my desperation I have written a negative post on Joomla Review page of the software and they actually taken my site down bullying me to remove the review!!!! When I didn't (because I simply didn't know how), they got Joomla to take my review off the Joomla.org site, beacuse they "donate" a lot of money to Joomla. As someone else said, they are quick off the mark to take your money, but they never deliver. After paying them over 3,000 Euro, I now have to go back to the drawing board and get another developer to develop a new site in Magento. Like said before stick to open source, Magento seems pretty good to me. Be warned, don't use IXXO CART!!!

now they have replied to me again saying that they may have a solution for me maybe after christmas - I cant wait that long, I am going to loose this project otherwise.

I will just have to accept I cannot win against IXXO Cart and not get my refund. I will just have to go back to Virtuemart and hope my client does not notice the different in software on the backend.

OUCH

Hi all,

I'm very, very glad I read this thread!

Was seriously consideing IXXO as an option, due to the problems I'm having with VirtueMart, but now I think I'm gonna stay well clear. Thanks everyone!!!

I've limited experience with Shopping Carts as I am new to this game, but I found VirtueMart easy to install and get off the ground. However, as soon as you want to do anything slightly out of the ordinary it becomes a lot more difficult. And, as previously mentioned, the forum is rubbish.

Previously I've only used carts like PayPal and Mal's e-commerce. Both of which I've no complaints about, but are only really suitable for shops with a small number of products. Now I need something a bit more "maintainance friendly" due to the number of products my clients are going to be selling.

I'm currently dabbling with CubeCart, but haven't really lifted the lid off it yet...

DA

I have patiently muddled about with VirtueMart on a number of sites. While it is free and feature rich, it is NOT a plug and play (shop sic) component. If you are an experienced developer and/or have time to dig under the covers to get it tailored to your needs, then you should use VM. However, for the rest of us, who are looking for a robust, well supported shopping cart I would suggest looking elsewhere.

Big Problem with integrating the Canada Post Shipping Module in VM. Do not install. It blew up my entire VM install and was out of business for weeks trying to sort it out.

I agree with earlier posts that suggest a commercial shopping cart is the way to go - still looking for one that offers great support and some level of integration with Joomla.

Parting comment - if your eCommerce is mission critical - do not compromise using sub standard components.

Joomla Developers....sounds like there is an opportunity to create a robust eCommerce commercial product for the Joomla community. I for one would be happy to pay for it.

I will be looking into Joomsuite Commerce is April 09' - http://www.joomsuite.com/index.php?opti ... &Itemid=14

Looks very promising and is tightly integrated into their other great extensions!!!

This image displays the sheer magnitude of its integration Looks just great

@Brad, Freeway Shopping Cart looks good...

I want something just for a simple 1 page shop on our website, nothing over the top. However this looks like it could do anything from a single page of items up to a full blown online store. The back end seems easy and intuitive as well.

Thanks for the link!

Regards,

.Joel

@active8

Prior to selecting IXXO cart for a site I was developing, we started programming around joomsuite. Their descriptions on their site looked fabulous and made your mouth water that someone had finally created some quality programs..... NOT.

A week before launch, we had to dump all of the joomsuite components we had because part of the shopping cart was delayed for the 3rd or 4th time (So don't hold your breath for the april 2009 launch). Their english is far from fluent and shows in all of their programming. One person even submitted a file to them with all the spelling corrections and they still haven't updated it. They added a U.S. person to their team that was supposed to help with that, and after privately hiring him out of despiration to get our site up, even he couldn't figure out how to do the things that I'd been promised were features in the program and he brushed it off as part of dealing with people in other countries that don't understand english and the nuances of certain words/phrases. Also, when I tried to hire him, he wanted me to personally go down to Bank of America and deposit money in his bank account, rather than send him payment thru paypal!?!?!?!?

We jumped to ixxo cart at that point because they supposedly offered great support, and as I've mentioned in previous posts in this thread, it's pretty nonexitent. Funny enough, on Christmas eve, I got a rash of emails from IXXO cart asking if "these" tickets were still open. THEY WERE FROM OCTOBER!!!!! It said I had 72 hours to respond and then 24 hours later (Chrismas Day afternoon), I get another set of emails showing that each of the tickets had been closed for non-response. I guess they don't celebrate Christmas in Germany! LOL. You have nothing better to do on Christmas morning than reply to 2 month old emails??? I have left the company I was programming the IXXO site for, and IXXO was a huge part of that. Now they are telling the company that "I" am to blame for most of their problems and that I did this and I did that -- nothing could be further from the truth. Their program has bugs in it but they will not admit that and will blame it on you (as confirmed by another poster on this forum).

If you chose to go to IXXO cart, also make sure that you are NOT using paypal as your payment gateway. If you are, then you will want to call up paypal and get one of their experts to help you set it up because the payment gateway addresses are all incorrect and if you attempt to use them as programmed, you will not be able to accept paypal payments and credit cards thru paypal in one shopping cart.

If you need more info on ixxo and paypal you can contact me directly as I don't want to put what took us over a month to figure out here until IXXO refunds me my money.

Still looking for that perfect shopping cart .

Be so kind and do not judge or guess the acts of some people with the overall german way or attitude. In fact I do not want to start and pull out a list of con-artists that sit inside the USA and rip off people even much, much more drastically. Thanks!

To the topic, do not use VM when you seek a one-stop-ecommerce-solution. When you want to invest money and / or time into a more lousy framework which is still some sort of useful when you do not want an enfinity store or want to work on it until you have one, then choose VM.

Try out xtCommerce Veyton 4.0 as a standalone and make a site with Joomla that is wrapped around it, my tip.

EDIT: Veyron is the Bugatti, Veyton the new xt:commerce shop

I looked at Cube Cart long ago, but there were too many out the box features missing. (Especially in terms of shipping, discount, and payment modules) Sure you could buy add-ons to fill in these gaps, but these additions really add up. The cost of this solution priced me out of my potential client's budgets. (I couldn't offer a price that fit in many of my small business client's budgets if I factored in the actual cost for CubeCart + all the add-ons that IMO I needed to offer a full featured solution.) Even if I factored out the cost concerns, there were still common sense features for which there was NO add-in and none forthcoming. The one that sticks out for me was the LACK of a contact FORM versus a contact PAGE.

OS Commerce was another solution I looked at but the project seems a bit scattered in terms of direction, and the lack of a solid templating system as part of the base code was a turn off for me.. I was also turned off by the lack of certain functions that I felt should be part of the core code and instead required add-ons. And while we're on the subject of their add-ons, I was a lot put off by MULTIPLE choices for add-ons that provided functionality that IMO should have been part of the core code (especially in the shipping and payment modules)..

OS Commerce and specifically one of it's former development team members (Linda McGrath) is what lead me to Zen Cart. In the OS Commerce world Linda seemed to write the best, most stable OS Commerce add-ons that played well with others.. So when she left I found out why, and this is what led me to Zen Cart. To answer the OPs question Zen Cart is my personal recommendation for the following reasons:
1. Feature rich with LOTS of great out the box features, you can use as much or as little of it as you need.
2. Excellent support forum where I have NEVER been left hanging when I had a question about ANYTHING
3. Native support for popular payment processors and shipping carriers.
4. Lots and lots of great add-ons
5. LOTS of possibilites for configuring and styling your store.. (I discover something new and cool to do with every store I build)

Since standardizing (so to speak) on Zen Cart as my e-commerce solution, I have been able to provide customers with a solution that meets all of their online selling needs, and because of the great support community, I am confident that I can support the product for my clients.. Combine that with the power of Joomla, and I am confident that I deliver a 1-2 punch to my clients in terms of their site needs.

Until recently, putting Zen Cart inside a wrapper usually failed due to session and other connection errors. Now there is a Joomla module called JZen in the extensions section. JZen suite of products consists of a bridge and selected Zen Cart sideboxes that allows you to place Zen inside a Joomla wrapper and run seemlessly. The logins between the two applications are synchronized,a nd for those of you who would want to style your store seperately form your Joomla site, the templating systems between the two remain independent..

JZen is just what the doctor ordered as far as I'm concerned as I love Joomla, and the ONLY e-commerce solution I offer clients now is Zen Cart. So now I can offer my clients the best of the best IMO..

I am not impressed with VirtueMart. It's buggy, full of half working/non working/poorly working features, and a community that provides NO SUPPORT for this product.. In fact not only do the developers take offense when you point out the lack of support, but they have a following of folks (who must've drank the VM koolaid) who will chastise you for daring to expect that when you ask questions in a SUPPORT forum, you will actually recieve SUPPORT.. It's like this is a novel concept to some there.. (You should see the number of "suck it up and take it" posts on that forum)

I built ONE VirtueMart site, struggled to keep it together for two years, and finally converted the client FOR FREE to Zen Cart. There were two features that NEVER worked well or never worked at all (states for countries where there are no states NEVER worked as it should, and the PayPal module was a NIGHTMARISH piece of hell that cost my client money in terms of lost sales.. (VirtueMart's notify.php script is a complete piece of garbage as far as I'm concerned.. ) The VirtueMart forum was no help because every search I did revealed hundreds of un-answered questions from folks who were having the EXACT SAME issues I was seeking answers to.. Since the conversion to Zen Cart, my client has never been happier.. In fact she was soooo happy she gave me two of her PayPal stores to convert..

The only add-on I know of that does anything close to what you describe is actually a template contribution. (Sanguine Embedded Template) This template allows you to embed Zen Cart into an existing website.. I used it for my 1st Zen Cart/Joomla combo website. However, you can't embed Zen Cart into Joomla using this template.. What you have to do instead is to create an HTML page that looks like a clone of your Joomla site, and embed Zen Cart into this clone page. (At least this is how I approached it..) Then I simply "synched" up the stylesheets between Zen Cart and Joomla to make everything look seemless as you go from Joomla sections of the site to Zen Cart sections and back again.. Now the logins between Zen Cart and Joomla are not integrated on this particular site, but we're not using the Joomla user login features, so for this client this "marriage" between Joomla and Zen Cart worked out very well..

I have been looking for a shopping cart that will

1. work with Joomla,
2. act as a catalogue only (prices but no checkout),
3. allow products to be added by registered users.

The carts I have seen so far have many and varied features but seemingly not the third of my requests.

Any ideas?

I was happy with Virtuemart.

I have a Joomla! shopping cart that I finished about 1 month ago. I am installing my 2nd customer this week. It is a Joomal integration with webERP accounting software.

Basically most of the data entry is done in webERP, photos of parts, tracking on hand quantities, creating purchase orders for replenishment. Sales orders are created in webERP using the Joomla! shopping cart and webERP is used to track fulfillment.

Unlimited price lists, sophisticated part search with year, manufacturer, model, category, total solution from inventory control to financial statments. As one of the developers of webERP, I was able to create a tight integration that utilizes webERP's credit limits, terms, account status for charging purchases to an open receivable account or payment through paypal which creates a receipt record in webERP. Frieght calculations and tax are all pulled from webERP.

If your willing to try something new http://rockwall-computer.com
http://weberp.org

This is truly a comprehensive solution from sales to financials.

Hi All,
Despite my ranking (not many posts) I have been using Joomla since before it was Joomla and developing sites for a long time.

Virtuemart (VM) has come a LONG way in the past few years and the next version (1.4 0r maybe 2) I hope will be fantastic as the wrinkles are ironed out.

Zen Cart (ZC) can be complex at first however honestly it is the most comprehensively developed attractive open source cart about but you do need to be prepared for the learning curve. Once you get used to it is excellent (however does not bridge with Joomla and runs seperately).

I would have to agree with almost everything Diva said above about both ZC and VM!

The learning curve can be said to be large in any new endeavour like a shopping cart.

I am looking forward to Open Freeway (OF) (yes I know its already here) however if you think VM and ZC are tricky I think Open Freeway for a newbie is very unfriendly.

I love its capabilities and what it can do however I am not a newbie and will be using this on a live site very soon.

For now, I am recommending VM to my clients who need a cart today and OF in the near future.

Really, it all depends on what you need and VM is really very easy out of the box for smaller stores but honestly dont bother for more than about 30 products!


Kaety

I do alot of Ecommerce designs.
If I were you I would go with OScommerce, or a varient like OSC Max
or have a look at http://onlinemarketinggenie.com/ecommerce-demo.html
for some custom ecommerce web designs.

In my opinion, stay away from openfreeway
in all honesty we have had nothing but problems.
We had to totally re-write openfreeway's
easy-import for products, and many other re-writes.

Inappropriate post Moderators PLEASE?

From this discussion I get the feeling that as far as shopping cart there is nothing that works from straight the box with Joomla.
Regarding the comment on ixxocart, I got the impression about their disappointing customer service from the reviews on their own site and decided to stay away.
This discussion might need to start with user requirement for a new system..

thanks for your post! The tricky part of reading experienced designers' advice is that it may be dated. It's nice to read your thoughts from only a few days ago.

Moondraak,
Thanks for the info.

I've got a small business as well and am considering moving the site over to joomla and will most likely replace the shopping cart as well.Have you written any reviews of the shopping carts you've used?

Thanks for your help.

Ha11ster

You guys need to check out this cart. http://joomla15.ijoomlademo.com/ click on that url then click on the ijoomla digistore and it will take you to a demo. http://www.ijoomla.com/ you can also click on this url and it will take you to the main site. Once there click on demo and then click on the front end or back on on the corresponding version of your joomla site. Log into the back end and check it out. Its pretty robust or check out the front end.

I will hold my breath waiting for this! They also IMO need to change the general attitude towards supporting their product. If VM was at least a decent well written solution out the box, perhaps they could continue to get away with not supporting it..


I couldn't agree more about the learning curve.. Once you get past that, Zen is FANTASTIC!! (Plus their forum has an EXCELLENT community of helpful folks..)

There are now two components/modules available to bridge Zen Cart & Joomla.. (Whoo hoo!!!)



I do agree somewhat that VM is appropriate for a very small SIMPLE store. But I can NEVER go down the VM road again.. Too many improvements that need to be made in terms of support and putting forth a solid less buggy product.. Frankly I am lucky my client still trusted me with her site after the VM fiasco she endured..

I am no shopping cart master, but I have been dabbling with shopping carts over the past few weeks with a few projects and I really like ZenCart. It is open source so there is no cost and there is a huge community of folks who develop for it. There site is really friendly and in the help section, I pretty much found most of my answers to configuration questions. Merchant Services

I think virtuemart is the best shopping cart extension of Joomla.

We have developed, after many trials and tribulations, an extensive IXXO Cart application for a client. While we did have some issues with support for awhile we found out who to go through at IXXO and support became faster.

Now, that said, panic has set in today as we cannot access our admin panel for the client IXXO Cart. The cart "calls home" each admin login to validate the software license. The IXXO websites (all of them) are down. Their North American Toll-free support number now seems to be a gov't office. Cannot get any answer from the phone number registered to the admin for the domain in Germany. In other words, we cannot work on the cart although it functions perfectly otherwise.

Has anybody heard what is going on? Could be a server crash or a data center problem - we all experience those at one point or another - but getting more than concerned as we were in middle of a major product database update.

Any other IXXO Cart users notice this today?

Just received this update from IXXO Cart:

We are currently experiencing issues with one of our servers. If your IXXO Cart License is on this cluster and it is currently down, this is the reason. We don’t have any additional information at this time, but we will update this post as soon as we have more specific details. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes and we hope to have everything back up shortly.

Update: This issue was caused by a power strip failure in one of our server racks. We have the datacenter engineers on their way to the datacenter to resolve the issue. We don’t have an ETA on when things will be fixed, but we are doing all that we can to remedy this issue as soon as we possibly can.

Update: For the most part, this issue has now been resolved. The datacenter engineers were quick to respond and resolve the problem with the circuit breaker. There was a small handful of servers that weren’t booting up correctly, so we had to go through and manually reboot them. We have most of the services back up and running, but there are still a few PS servers that we’re still working on. We should have those all back up and running shortly. We’ll post one final update once we’re confident everything is resolved.

So which shopping cart do you prefer?

Have you had experience with ecommerce or Zen?

Please use the search, and do not use other peoples threads for off topic issues. Use your own thread if needed in the correct forum.