Enhance and move the Virtuemart brand and websites forward

[Studio 42]

Lindapowers

You seem annoyed.
What are you trying to achieve with your statement?
VM needs investment to continue its existence.  Under what business model do you expect it to run in order to stay alive?

I mean, if more use VM the VM shop get more customers.
In the French forum, you had more then 20 post only for VM each days.
Currently you have only one per day.
So Vm loose each year more users.
WHen i check with the users, why they stopped to use VM, most time they think the evolution is bad and that the some changes should be done on the back-end, because it's not friendly, to complex ...
So now suppose you have 2000000 VM shop that need to buy extention in the VM shop compared to current estimate 100000 real shops. Is this not a business model ?

Some stats http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/VirtueMart but you can remove certainlly 50% shop that use old release or sold nothing.

[StefanSTS]

Regarding the last few posts combined.

VirtueMart lost lots of users in the time when the software was rewritten in VirtueMart 2 times, that is right, because lots of features did not find its way back so quickly and lots of things were different from VM 1.

User numbers clearly went up after VirtueMart 3 was out for some time. Users realised that features are back and that it is really stable now. There are migrations from Magento and even WooCommerce, because people don't find the flexibility there.
I have not one customer that would not stay with VirtueMart. They are all very happy about the stability. And that is for Shops running VM 2.x with Joomla 2.5 up to most recent versions of VM 3 and Joomla 3.x. Both are still fine in terms of security, VM 3 offers some more features and is easier to handle.

The backend might not be too easy in the beginning, but for running shops the learning curve for a shop owner is not really steep. Once the shop is online, there is little to do wrong.
Well, there is always place for improvement and the team is working on it. Continuously actually, not many days the dev chat would be quiet.

I wonder how people who actually have no clue about the team behind VirtueMart could say, there is no team. Of course, Max has the last word in everything, that is what a lead developer is for. Just because he rejected some code, that was not thought through properly, there is a big rant here now. Well, your decision.
The same thing, I had to face in the beginning, there are great solutions for a single shop, but you cannot simply use these things in general, because shops have different requirements. If somebody takes such decisions/rejections of code personally, well, that is again that persons decision.

I guess some people don't like/understand that Max/iStraxx is the owner of the trademark VirtueMart, he took over the waggon and is pulling it since he took over many years back. The software VirtueMart has to be financed in some way and the trademark is one pillar of keeping VirtueMart going forward. I guess, most shop owners with a sense for business will understand that and they will understand that an open source software is not building itself from nothing. Open Source software does need developement and developement costs money.

So even the VirtueMart membership should be understood as a means to support VirtueMart. Shop owners who make a reasonable profit with this free software can pool in, and from my point of view, they should in their own interest. This way nobody is forced to buy a license for VirtueMart and can start a business with minimal expenses. I recommend buying a membership to all my customers at least once the shop is working well.

It is very easy to say to make it better without even needing to do anything yourself. From my point of view, VirtueMart is a great system that is successfully competing with companies with a much larger budget. The advertising for VirtueMart and the polished words might suffer from that sometimes, because the main focus is on the software and time is limited resource, but then it is nice to see, people like claesbas offer their help and try to support VM in their way.

I'd rather talk about that topic here again.

Stefan

[luislpv22]

Lindapowers

You seem annoyed.
What are you trying to achieve with your statement?
VM needs investment to continue its existence.  Under what business model do you expect it to run in order to stay alive?

I mean, if more use VM the VM shop get more customers.
In the French forum, you had more then 20 post only for VM each days.
Currently you have only one per day.
So Vm loose each year more users.
WHen i check with the users, why they stopped to use VM, most time they think the evolution is bad and that the some changes should be done on the back-end, because it's not friendly, to complex ...
So now suppose you have 2000000 VM shop that need to buy extention in the VM shop compared to current estimate 100000 real shops. Is this not a business model ?

Some stats http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/VirtueMart but you can remove certainlly 50% shop that use old release or sold nothing.

I'm doing a lot of work in the backend now, with a simpler and lighter interface, and of course with some little new useful features, everything without touching a single model, it is being done in the views, with the data given by current models.

One of these features is a live preview on products edit of how the prices will be showed in the frontend, because setting up prices in VM requires almost to be an engineer, so you won't have to login  with different users in the frontend anymore to see if these prices are ok.
Another one which isn't done yet, allows you to assign colours to order statuses.

If Max seems interested, I will share everything, but I don't see myself contacting him, so I hope he reads this thread.