X-Cart versus VirtueMart

[addison]

Dear Friends,

I found X-Cart as a great e-commerce software solution (www.x-cart.com). It offers incredible features to create a very powerful website.

It will be great if someone from the Development Team will spend some time to analyze X-Cart features. Now it is a huge difference between X-Cart and VirtueMart and I hope the time will resolve this. A full license to X-Cart + modules is around 700 USD! It makes everything I want but I do not have the money to invest in such of think.

If you have other commercial e-commerce software looking forward to know about them and analyze.

Waiting for your comments and new VM versions.

Addison

[Shibumi]

I briefly looked into X-Cart, as well as osCommerce, Zen-Cart and others... The nice thing about VM is that it's open source (free), it is modular, and runs inside of Joomla... what does this mean? If you just want an online store, you can use something like the previously mentioned carts, but VM runs inside of Joomla as a component.  So, you can build the main content of your site in Joomla, and your store with VM.  With Open Source comes some limitations - support is given by the community and not always the dev team... but at the same time, modifications to suit individual needs are a lot easier to acheive then in something like X-Cart.  User friendliness is also more apparent in VM... I've heard a lot of people complain about how difficult it is to set up and use osCommerce, and I myself found it cumbersome and not very intuitive.  Open Source also allows for user input - if you have an idea for something, good chance it could become a reality in VM before it does in something like X-Cart.  Anyways, I have been using VM for over a year, and very actively for the past 6 months - I have made and implemented a lot of customization to my VM component of our site, and I love it. 'nuf said?

Cheers

[addison]

Thanks CiPHerR!

X-Cart has some interesting modules: Comparation, Wish List, Configurator, Maximizer. In this moment many users of VM just dream about.

VM is great but it is slow in development, anyway better then OSCommerce. I am sure the time will resolve this but I hope not to be over 2 years! We are still waiting 1.1.0 version together with Joomla 1.5. Maybe after the conference in Germany a lot of modifications will be done to the software.

What customizations did you make to VM? Are they public?

Addison

[Shibumi]

Yes, it would be nice to see VM 1.1, but Soeren needs a dev team, right now it's just him for the most part - Maybe the VM days will get more developers interested in getting involved and helping Soeren with dev on 1.1.

Many - custom extended featured products on the front page, related products, newest products, small and medium sized product thumbnails, and a lot of back end mods - like showing mfr, cat, editable price field, last date price modified shown in the main product list in product admin...  And yes, most of my mods are posted here somewhere in the forums, and implemented and viewable at our site in my sig.

Cheers