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..

This component is a great online store that will satisfy the needs of most people. I've used a few other ecomm software packages in the past. Although they may dazzle you with features, most people do not need bells and whistles.

One word of caution - previous versions of VirtueMart did not verify the amount of money paid by PayPal. I believe this problem has been fixed in the most recent version.

We shifted from a commercial software to VirtueMart and are quite pleased. Not only does it cost less, it also is able to do more for us (we like the many different features, such as the automatic bestseller module, flexible order handling- well just about everything)... :-) However, trouble started when we added Joomfish to our Joomla Site .... We got a German - English mixture in the menue and were not able to change it. Once we deinstalled Joomfish everything worked just fine again. Since our shop is in German only we can live with this limitation (and still hope, it will be removed one day!).

The product is great, but the forum community is unresponsive to simple questions from new users. In searching for answers to many questions, such as adding product fields, there are a huge amount of simple questions from sincere users who are having difficulty understanding the complex process of adding fields (requires MySQL skill), and these questions are ignored. Not a good sign for me.

I am forced to use the more comlex osCommerce solution due to the inability to add custom fields to product descriptions. I am a MySQL programmer, but its not what I am looking for in a simple storefront.

I have not attempted to create a shop yet with VirtueMart (I will in the next few months) but I can confirm that the core functionality of this extension was more than adequate for me to create a fairly elaborate catalogue of items (record releases) in only a few days.

On the upside - some of the winning features:

1) I easily added a new "Product Type" (which I simply called "Features") and then added a number of new descriptive attributes (as drop down lists with multi-selection if desired, free text, dates etc) to each "Product". This allowed a significant number of extra and searchable (filterable) attributes for each of my products (items in my catalogue).

2) Adequate multi-language support - that meant I could (and did) change every reference of the word "Product" to "Release" by simply changing one file - and this is reflected in both the user and admin interfaces. I also changed "SKU" to a more friendly "Release ID" (and published it - see below).

On the downside.... it's a little hard to customise the user interface as there is:
1) extensive use of inline styles (I repaced those when I needed to) and
2) inconsistent coding for some of the modules (they were written outside the original project and tacked on 'as is' I suspect).

The impact of that was that when hacking, I got used to the way the core product had been coded and then found that I had to (a) look in a totally different part of the site and (b) adapt to a whole different way of coding to make the change ("featured products" being the an example).

But hey! What should I expect for nothing?

(Hint, in the absence of a easily found Component / Module to -> backend file map, I went into english.php to find the language variable and then used Grep to find where that was referenced in the site files.)

Anyone who's worked in application development (corporate or for yourself) can atest that creating something with anywhere near this level of functionality takes hours (and hours and hours).

I should point out that I do not expect to take any upgrades for this product. I've left the core Joomla well alone but I've hacked this to the point where this will be the only release I use on this site (other than my own future customisations of course).

For the next site, I'll take the latest release and, using the experience I've gained in the last few days, do it again but hopefully a bit quicker and/or better....

Listen to that!! "The last few days" - that's all it's taken to get something pretty decent up and running and it's my first attempt at a Joomla site.

Many thanks to the people who've created this. If I ever make a dollar or two profit I'll send a bit your way.

Virtuemart is a very handy component, especially if you are only using 10% of its capabilities. The problem occurs when you try to use csv upload or multi rate shipping or even to set minimum values on items before orders, these are just a few of the questions that churn up time and time again on the user forum only to never get a reply.

You try and scan the docs for the solution but they only show basics too so the user is left in a stalemate. I would love to show support for virtuemart and donate to the developer if on ANY occasion I have had a question about functionality it had been dealt with or at the very least be in the documentation, as it stands though this is the best cart software available for Joomla and I find that very off putting.

Dont get me wrong, I dont hate it, in fact I use it for a couple of sites I designed but if I had a choice I think it would be put to the curb. Developers, consider a similar method to SMF charter members to gain revenue in order to provide a higher level of service, I would pay as long as there was a decent support system in place and I KNOW there are others that would do the same. We need a product that works and works well and one we know how to use..

regards

I've been examining Virtuemart (VM) for a little over a month now. IMO, the most compelling reasons to use VM is because it is a component of Joomla and easy to setup and use out of the box, that's it. If VM were a stand alone application it would not be very impressive, just another cart, and there are a lot of carts out there that do much more than VM. A lot of the VM code base is not pretty (hard coded HTML mixed in with business logic) so layout customization beyond the basics requires digging into the code. The good part is, there seems to be a lot of interest in VM and if it could ever take full advantage of the Joomla framework and get a good templating engine, it would have real possibilities.

Amid the many web stores I have developed, populated and managed, this is by far the best and the easiest to use. It is laid out lagically and highly functional in its approach. The way is is constructed is very search engine friendly, particularly with the write hands tapping away at the keyboard. And although not totally neccesary, the store produces completely search engine friendly URLs with the use of OpenSEF, even when products are loaded into multiple categories. And best of all, it works with Joomla. Just take a look upon this site to see but a few of the possibilities that the Joomla network of components provides. As for complaints, when considering all the other software I have unfortunately used to develop online stores, I am quickly reminded that the only complaints I have is that I wasted my time using such stores as Miva Merchant, OScommerce, ZENcart and a handful of others before realizing the impact that the Joomla / Virtuemart / OpenSEF / Gallery2 / Joomboard / Other component packages have upon you, your retail efforts and those retail efforts of your clients.