I really love this cart. I set it up quickly and and does everything except there is no affiliate system. i really need that. I've tried to search in the support forums for the cart and have asked whether or not there is an intention to do an affiliate program but have received no response. So, I'll be switching to a commercial cart. Unfortunately...

I tried VirtueMart a few months ago but found the template layout frustrating so I gave up on it.
However, just yesterday i noticed that VirtueMart had upgraded so thought i'd give it another go and it has improved heaps. I've been trying to find a decent Joomla shopping cart for at least 6 months now and nothing really worked - I even bought a competitors component (ECJC) which was OK at first but that's also frustrating now. VirtueMart seems to be the best option for me at the moment. It also makes it easy to connect to payment gateways which for someone like me is a god send!

Well done on the much needed improvements - thanks for sharing this with us mere mortals. keep up the good work.

Ok, I admit it, I am a complete newbie. In fact, I am not a dev or programmer--I am just a middle aged lady who wanted to sell my art and create an online community. Joomla and CB (more fantastic people and products!) solved the last two wishes, but I can only say WOW to VirtueMart for sharing such a SUPER extension! It was incredibly easy to install, fantastic documentation on the website for the minor issues I have experienced and best of all, it works perfectly with my Paypal account. If this little-old-lady can figure it out, it really IS a dream product! Thank YOU!

I must say, VM goes above and beyond competing projects.

Support is remarkable, as the community is a bustling and thriving smorgasbord of users and developers, all of them ready and willing to offer their support.

Customization of this component is easy, but you'll need a working knowledge of basic PHP functions.

All in all, if you need an e-commerce solution to integrate into your Joomla! installation, this is it. If you're using Joomla!, use this project: don't try to integrate anything, as they won't work as seamlessly as this one.

It's a GREAT start on an excellent shopping cart, but it requires too much work to get it running in a seamless fashion.

The templates don't work well (new templates don't work and even when you customize the default templates there aren't enough options to make it worth doing. You have to re-code the back end to provide enough flexibility!)

Tax and shipping configurations are buggy and confusing. I STILL haven't figured them out yet.

The overall code complexity is higher than it needs to be which makes for difficult customization (which is required to get it running, they say so right on their website).

It's a noble effort, and one that I hope succeeds, but they need some seasoned developer help.

After 40 hours of development time on my end... I'm giving it 2 stars, grudgingly.

Since the last upgrade, the virtuemart shop convinced me that this really is the shopping cart solution to use.

Use it for a while now and it is stable, and easy to handle.
Offcourse it is still a wok in progress and always can be improved,.. but what isn't?

For downloads only, or for products which needs to be shipped, this shop is a great solution. It's easy to handle and needs almost no explanation for the shop holder.

For multi lingual and/or international shops... I don't know if this is what you should use. But as long as you use 1 language and a differsity of shipping- and payingmethods, this does the job.
It can't be compared to OSCommerce, yet, since it's much younger, and new features regularly come out. And Virtuemart has an integrated CMS solution which OSCommerce can't offer, the strength of Joomla!

At the end the best plus for me and most joomla users is the seamless integration with our favorite CMS.

I'm using this product for my site. Definitely fits the bill, however the main problem is support. There's virtually none. Looking on the virtuemart support forum, there's literally hundreds of unanswered problems. Seems the dev team isn't so sure of the inner-workings of this product either.

If you need support for the hundreds of questions you'll have, then this is NOT the product for you.

I had to move an existing shopping cart to a new solution in Joomla. This one worked great - much better than the old one as this also works well with OpenSEF.

Fantastic, hats off to the developers!
This is a fully featured professional-standard ecommerce solution IMHO.
Only thing I had trouble getting my head around is the taxes, virtual tax, displaying and discounting tax, but if you read hte forums there are work-arounds and explanations.
the installation manual is probably the best I have ever read - SO clear and easy to follow - you won't have any problems installing VM if you follow the simple instructions - they don't assume any particularly technical knowledge.
Creating products and building the shop was a pleasure, and the range of modules which are included is fantastic, although the modules' layouts are pretty tacky-looking. I WISH this component relied more on CSS rather than the inline styling - we should be able to easily choose product title font sizes etc.
It is also not clear how to test the whole system from the outset - example dummy data would be helpful, and somewhere to point and test the payment methods would be appreciated. I for one have no ide how we are supposed to use the PayPal IPN testing page :S
I am generally VERY IMPRESSED and I look forward to this just getting better and better! My clients are going to LOVE it!

I'm looking to create an online catalog, and this definitely does the job. The company I'm doing it for sells products whose prices are negotiated, and unfortunately there is no way to simply turn the shopping cart into a simple list that can be emailed for a price quote. In the demo, there's an "email this vendor for more information" link on some products, but that feature does not appear to be in the downloadable version (?) nor does it snag the product name and force it in the email header. Please keep going with this component!

I have this running on 4 production sites right now. Though some of it's set-ups are a tad quirky, and there are at times "too many options", it's an excellent tool to sell anything, and the PayPal integration is seamless and top-notch. If you want to sell anything, set yourself up a PayPal account, and play around with this thing to fit your needs, and your off.

sadly, I have to agree with pixiepie (whose analysis was perfect). This extension had SUCH potential, but when I went to look for answers to my questions about integrating authorize.net with virtuemart all I found were people with the same questions. Whatever responses there were on the site were cryptic at best. I would be willing to pay for a joomla based e-commerce system if that's what it would take for full support. It doesn't seem like I've found my joomla e-commerce solution yet. I think that the day that a full and polished solution arrives is the day that Joomla truly catches on. Joomla NEEDs a good e-commerce extension.

I've slowly been starting to sell stuff on my site. Virtual mart is a great way to handle it for me. The only things I would tweak are...
1. Allow me to tweak the modules for left, center, right alignment in the admin side. (Still don't know how to do this, the code doesn't like being edited at all)
2. Tweaking the tax thing for US users better. I like that it calculates sales tax, but it's a bit hard for beginners like me.

After using oScommerce for years, switching to Virtuemart was like a breath of fresh air. Installs easily out of the box. Loads of features that I needed to install Mods to get elsewhere and some of the most generous community members I've ever met. Yes, Soeren (Lead Developer) is worked to the bone like the lead in most OS projects (hat's off also to OpenSEF's Marko + KenMCD). At the same time when traeted reasonably I've been quite overwhelmed by the personal support and generosity of time on VM. They are a small team, but with big hearts and a great product (and many great mods in the forums). Thanks again Team Virtuemart for helping feed my family. :) 5/5

I want to thank bpresent, Kenosha, bunglehaze for saying all that NEEDS to be said about this component.. Their comments ring very true for me, and I want to add on to what they have already said..

This is a handy component if you need a fairly SIMPLE e-commerce solution that works with Joomla. However, what has already been said is VERY true.. The support on the VirtueMart forum is TERRIBLE.. I've used enough OS solutions where I come to expect that you will find an open RESPONSIVE community of folks who can assist with setup & configuration, error messages, as well as customizations and tweaks.. This component has VERY LITTLE, and asking a question on their forum is like PULLING teeth.. You either get NO response, a HALF response, or some weird coded "Pod People" like message in response to your questions.. You will have NO problem finding other folks asking your same question.. What you will have trouble with is getting someone to RESPOND in a coherent or comprehensive manner to ANY of the questions that get asked over and OVER again.. I can't tell you how many posts only include the responses of other forum members asking the SAME information, but no actual responses GIVING that information.. When 20 people ask the SAME question, it means we ain't ALL stupid or lazy!!!! It means we need an ANSWER!!! I even PM'd Soren on of my questions (a question MANY members had asked and not received and answer for BTW), and he NEVER responded.. That's NOT good..

IMO, there a COMMON sense features MISSING from the core code.. I can give you TWO examples:

1. The PayPal payment module does not pass shipping info over to PayPal by default, leaving the shopper to either re-enter the data again, or leaving the store owner to manually enter it when doing order fulfillment. You want an example of the POOR support on their forum; it took SIX posts on several different topics before I got ONE member to respond on how/where to correct this, and while he was helpful, his answer did not provide a COMPLETE response.. It took another FOUR posts and some digging around that useless forum (using some really weird and obscure search criteria BTW) to find out how to format the country and state codes so that I was passing over correctly formatted data to PayPal.. After all of that I was wondering, "WHY DID I HAVE TO DO THIS???!!!" If this solution offers PayPal as a payment option, why isn't it coded to really WORK COMPLETELY with PayPal.. At the VERY LEAST why did they not provide folks with the info they need to get it to work completely with PayPal.. Why isn't the admin tool setup to configure this???
2. VirtueMart offers (I think) a neat feature which allows users to do a passive signup. This uses the shoppers e-mail address as their user login. Shoppers do not need to create a username and password when they register for the store.. They simply enter in their billing data, and VirtueMart creates a username using their e-mail address.. HOWEVER, VirtueMart truncates the username if it is over 25 characters.. I had to finally come over to THIS forum (the Joomla forum) just to find out how to remove this retarded mismatch of code, and I had to go to TWO places to do this.. Did they not anticipate that e-mail addresses MIGHT be over 25 characters when they added this to their code??????????? Why not tell folks how to change it??? WHY NOT PUT IT IN THE ADMIN PANEL WHERE YOU ACTIVATE THE DARN PASSIVE SIGUP???????????????????????????????

That all said VirtueMart is a DECENT out of the box solution if you want a shopping cart which integrates with Joomla. Expect though that the road to get there may be hindered by the LACK of support on the VirtueMart site, and expect that you will find a few features which are incomplete or do not work well (CSV upload is a feature that REALLY does not work well.. DESPITE the developer’s claims -- the MANY (largely unanswered) support questions regarding this topic prove this point..).. It's a darn shame really, and I hope this doesn't to sound ungrateful.. I know that the nature of OS software development is a labor of love for many of the developers involved, and as a site developer, I applaud and appreciate their efforts. However, there is also a small amount of responsibility to support the work which is clearly missing in the VirtueMart project.. Perhaps the VirtueMart team gets away with this lack of community support because they have been the only game in town for a while (it appears) for an e-commerce solution which integrates with Joomla.. I banged VirtueMart into place, but I have only used it for ONE of my sites... I'm not sure if I'll use VirtueMart again even with all I've learned unless the support improves.. While it's been a good learning experience doing this, if I do anymore e-commerce sites using Joomla, I will either configure a cart outside Joomla and link it to my Joomla site or I'll be giving ECJoomCommerce (once they get their 1.5.3 release out) a more serious look..