How many Virtuemart websites are there?

[morktron]

Hi, I've been using VirtueMart for all my clients eCommerce sites for a few years now. It is a reliable and stable ecommerce platform with a huge support community.

One of my clients has hired an online marketing speshitpillt who says everyone is leaving the site at checkout on the register / login page.

I think it is highly likely that it is the product and not the website that is the issue but I have no stats to make my point.

So does anyone know how many websites are using virtuemart successfully?

[jjk]

I have no clue...
The only thing I know that the "Live Stores" link currently lists 1630 VM shops. However, I suppose the number of shops using VM is much higher, but certainly smaller than the 2.5+ million downloads of VM.
Personally, I think the vast majority of cases where people are leaving a webshop without making a purchase it is not the fault of the shopping cart software in use.

Nowadays a growing number of potential customers are surfing the net to compare prices. But frequently the only way to find the final price for a product, is to add a product to the cart, make a few additional selections and then quit the process. I do this frequently, too. But this is the website designer's fault (making additional costs like shipping cost, taxes, etc. only available in the final steps of the checkout process)

Some time ago there was a related article in the online "Smashing Magazine". Currently the article is not directly accessible, but at present it's still available in the Google cache:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:orz4rEFWJPAJ:www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/10/08/15-common-mistakes-in-e-commerce-design-and-how-to-avoid-them/+15-common-mistakes-in-e-commerce-design&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.de

[kevinwood]

I agree with jjk... I don't think that VM's checkout process is any more complicated or onerous than, say, Amazon's.  That said, one thing I have found is that the user fields and especially which ones are mandatory needs to be tweaked from the defaults. That can make a big difference.  People resent being forced to answer what they consider to be irrelevant questions just to make a purchase.

[PRO]

My main site is very successful , the other ones are not. BUT thats mainly a traffic issue.

I have a 2 step checkout process. "silent account creation"

Virtuemart checkout is a walk in the park compared to amazon, sam ash, tiger direct etc.

Try this out. Change to silent account creation. THEN, try a coupon code that does not show up until checkout.

[Bruce Morgan]

I agree with the above except i require a user account. It makes it just a little easier for me to track serious shoppers versus visitors.  I think the ykey metrics are conversion ratio and cart abandonment tate.  Aim for a conversion rate of at least 2% (aim for 3%) and aim for cartabondonment under 40%.

Bruce
www.pepper-passion.com

[jjk]

...but I have no stats to make my point.

Eventually you can monitor your customer's site with piwik.org in order to have your own stats.

[morktron]

Hi people thanks for your very helpfull posts!

I guess there is room for improvement then for my clients site - always show the shipping costs. Remove a few rego fields. Silent account creation has always been enabled.

After reading the Smashing Mag article and the one about Amazon I see it would be hugely beneficial if it was possible not to have registration at all in VM. Alternativly if they could pay before filling in thier details it might be good.

Anyway thanks again everyone, a million sales to you all!

[eCabinetStore]

I don't know how many. I just know that I have five

[VM_Fans]

Many sites use virtuemart as their shopping cart system. The advantage is that virtuemart is a component of Joomla. So it combines CMS and shopping cart. It's very good for SEO.

[Vertical Pigeon]

morktron,

VirtueMart is the most popular e-commerce system in the world.

Vertical Pigeon has tracked and assessed over 101,000 of them.

If you extrapolate that world-wide, you get about 135,000 VirtueMart websites total.

Something interesting we have encountered, is that only a small percentage of all of those sites are using the latest version of VirtueMart.

[jjk]

Well..., I've just typed the urls of 5 well established VirtueMart shops into Vertical Pigeon's 'Joomla verification center' and it missed all of them! So there are at least 5 more 

[PRO]

Something interesting we have encountered, is that only a small percentage of all of those sites are using the latest version of VirtueMart.

Seems to produce a wrong result on the sites I just ran through it.