I purchased ECJC because it is much more robust than Virtuemart (wish list, affiliate programs, etc.)

It is definitely not for the faint of heart. You need to be an advanced PHP coder to install and operate this beast.

It is extremely difficult to adjust the look - there are no templates. Like earlier versions of oscommerce, the "template" is spread out among dozens of files.

Some oscommerce contribs work fine - others that require a multi-column layout (like gift registry) will just not work.

The worse part is: ECJC's support forum appears dead. I've been waiting three months for a response to a question I posted on a mambot that I purchased. No response from site owner or other users.


Since my site is not live yet, I'm expecting more headaches (like the mail issue) when real customers start using it.

I've used osc since 2003, and have a few stores running it, but was really looking for a cart that was joomla native, and this lead me to ecjc.

I picked it over virtuemart for a few reasons;

1) because it was more obviously descendant from osc

2) I seemed to be able to get my custom plugins working (not quite right)

3) It did more, and it did stuff I needed

4) access to a shared codebase from osc

The limitations I found with the product really are that it has only a few users and developers working on it. What that translates to is that if you have a problem you probably need to nut it out yourself, either the time or the $$$.

Now that osc has released 2.2, and joomla 1.5, I don't really know what will happen to this product. It likely that integrating the osc 2.2 codebase changes, as well as alterations to support joomla 1.5 are quite a way off unless this project gets more support.

till

One of the best solution for shopping cart.

After a very frustrating experience with VM, I had hoped that this one would be better.

This package had a ton of stuff built-in that VM simply could not do, and it seemed, at first to be a good bridge between my favorite CMS & OSCommerce. Everything seemed to be going well, and you can even use many OSCommerce plugins as an added bonus.

But then I realized that the system could not send out emails.

I will say that the forum support is quick & excellent, and that it is possible that it may be something with my host (not sure, though). But I was not able to solve the problem. All test scripts that I tried were able to send emails, as was Joomla itself, but not this package.

I really like the package, and it had everything that I needed/wanted, but without the ability to send out emails, it is useless.

Not many people had this problem, but some did.
I tried all of the suggested fixes, but none of them worked.
I may try it again in the future, but for now, I will have to look elsewhere.

Owner's reply:
The email issue was brought to my attention, it is sorted out with the 1197 release due out, we have removed the oscomm mail class in favour of joomla mosmail function.

I purchased this product recently and things were going great. It's well integrated into Joomla and has a good mix of CIP addons and features. This is where the buck stops though.

Once the product was installed, I enabled the Affiliate feature and all seemed well until I started testing the Affiliate sign-up feature. It's broke which is no big deal because I had found and fixed about 6 bugs already. I'm not a developer but I can hold my own with hacks and fixes.

Well, this one I couldn't for the life of me figure out! I sent Chris (Joomla-host dev/owner) a PM and put a message in the forums. Over a week later, no response. One could almost assume the project is dead?

The forums have no activity from the site owner and no responses to others plea for help. Granted, the product was cheap to purchase but come on, if your not going to support it, state it in your site somewhere so that the buyer can assess if it's a product worth purchasing without support.

Owner's reply:
Hi:

Unfortunately this seems to have happened while i was taking a long overdue break, 2 years of constant work i needed a month off, I am once again back on the project and will be looking into the affiliate system.

I will have to admit, I have experience working with osCommerce on some past sites, so the learning curve wasn't too bad for this shopping cart. At first glance it can be overwhelming. However, I found it easier to use and customize than virtuemart. I too used virtuemart for other joomla sites primarily for its popularity, but wasn't happy with the limitations. I still can't stand the goofy "out of the box" text that osCommerce comes with such as "Let's see what we have here", but it's easy enough to change. Good work! Thanks!

Although I've not yet tried this extension, there are some completely unfair points in VB Design's review that need addressing -

1. Required Fields - asking for Gender - this is becoming a mandatory field for credit card processing under the new merchant services standards. Incorrect gender input = transaction declined. It is a security feature and online payment processors such as PayPal, MoneyBookers, NoChex et al are being forced into adopting it as new security layers are rolled out.

2. Elective Fields - US Tax ID - true this could be coded to only show if the customer is US based, however, it also doubles for things such as EC VAT number in order that business customers can reclaim VAT paid, or be charged it by Customs if importing. It is not required for retail customers and maybe a radio button on/off switch could be added. My own experience of osCommerce makes me believe that doing so would introduce a new bug opportunity, and such core field codes are best left alone - customers who don't need the field will just ignore it.

3. Default currency is hard coded in the configuration files (or can be set in the admin control panel) - believe it or not, the US Dollar is not the primary currency for the majority of the world, therefore why should it be the default primary? Having an obscure currency like the Rand will remind people to reset it.

4. Quote - "The selection of products to be added to the catalog, did not allow for selecting multiple unique items, and then adding them all to the cart at once. I had to wade through 3 screens, for each of 3 items before I could add the three softwares I wished to buy to the cart."
Those are two completely different functions - adding items to CATALOG is an admin function, adding to CART is a customer/user function (and you can add to cart with a single click then move to next product and do the same - you don't need to go through the cart for each one). There are several bulk-product uploaders in the osCommerce contributions area.

5. Physical address for invoicing purposes - see point 1. above - this is an increasing required security check - even for digital downloads - and failing to collect an address invalidates PayPal Seller Protection Policy = you could have the product downloaded, do a chargeback and get it, and there's nothing the seller can do to protect or recover payment without the address.

6. Phone number as required field - can be used for address verification online from anywhere - there are even special softwares that do it via the online phone directories AND electoral registers. See points 1. and 5. above.

7. PayPal transactions not completing - this is a known problem with the default core PayPal IPN - it is because the customer does not return to the seller site after completing the transaction at PayPal. There is another version of the IPN (created and supported by the osC team) which corrects this by pre-recording the transaction before the buyer is sent to PayPal. It can be found in the osC contributions library.

8. Cardinal Sin etc ... osCommerce (on which this extension was based) was designed as a completely independent Open Source stand-alone package - it is huge and has been around a lot longer than Joomla. That the extension designer has been able to get osC to integrate with Joomla is nothing short of miraculous given the original osC's complexity.

osCommerce, like Joomla, is Open Source - that preconditions that admin users have to spend time personalising installations.

If you want a real indication of the power in this extension - view the "not for international sellers" review I've just written for VirtueMart - it looks in detail at the requirements for shipping configs needed when selling globally - VirtueMart is pathetic in comparison to the power in osCommerce.

I will certainly be trying this extension out as I need to integrate existing osC stores into Joomla front ends, but I am left wondering how commercial your developer-led thinking is regarding payment security online? I certainly do not enjoy buyers being able to reclaim their payment after receiving the goods, and there being nothing I can do about it because I didn't collect enough personal data to pursue them.

Gaz

Just installed ECJC 1.1.96 and it was a breeze to install on J1.0.13, I found it much easier than VM. I am going to switch my cart over to this from VM, it has the features that I need today, not just features that are in development.

Vendor system works great, and it will help me speed up my order process.

The new admin is easy to use, and with the added FAQ section most install issues are covered so you do not have to search the internet for a fix.

After one-day I am already adding products and I have the site working right with my templates. The fact that this is built on Oscommerce is great, I can port over some of my favorite contribs from my old shopping cart. Additionally, I can just export my old products with Easy Populate and load them into ECJC. SSL works great too!

Great work, and thanks for bringing us a shopping cart for Joomla that is worth using.

Not totally straight forward to install for the beginer, but well worth the perseverance. I'm v happy to have these two great opensource projects working together. I've also managed to make use of the oscomerce patches I needed and it's all working quite happily.

I've worked with several open source shopping carts and my personal preference is osCommerce because of the rock solid ecommerce capabilities both on the end user and admin store management side.

ECJC is currently a great addition to Joomla for those desiring an excellent tried and true shopping cart system. The developers so far have done a good job improving the integration of osCommerce into Joomla and continue to make improvements in the integration.

We currently have the ECJC component working with CB and several other Joomla components.

It does need some improvement in a few areas, but if you are looking to sell products, take credit cards, have shipping calculated on the fly, manage catalogs of products, manage 1000's of customers, and much more than osCommerce (ECJC) is the best shopping cart I have seen offered yet to Joomlaites.

Like others, I almost missed this one, believing that Virtuemart was better due to it's high popularity and good rating. Virtuemart is good, but ECJC is clearly better. The ECJC integration of OSCommerce is superb, with a much cleaner admin interface and better integration with Joomla stylesheets. More useful features in the standard package too, especially tools to help users upsell and boast customer loyalty. Support is also excellent. (unlike Virtuemart).

Oh my, almost did not try this component because of its 2.5 star rating. Then I looked at the dates of the reviews (all in 2006) and the date of the last update (40 days ago). I pinched my nose, closed my eyes and took the leap.

Uploading and setting up was a breeze. Looked at the component and found that it is, at first glance, exactly like OSCommerce.

I've only been playing with it for no more than ten minutes and am impressed. Will try to post back again. For now, GREAT JOB!!!

This extension at first blush looked very promising. There was a freeware version that allowed me to get a good feel for it and it seemed fully featured.

It was upon my attempting to purchase their commercial product, which is a trivial cost, that I realized that being on the user end of their cart was clumsy, and a little annoying. It has subtle but serious issues in real world application.

One issue; the Required fields in the payment form made no sense, and some of the elective fields should not have even been displayed. The required fields should be under the control of the shop owner, especially as questions such as requiring Gender, is totally unnecessary for validating a transaction and could be offensive to some customers. I found this question specifically posted on the support forums, with no validation or reply from the developers, and no solutions offered by the community.

A similar issue; the display of inappropriate elective fields in the form. Joomla is all about dynamic content. If a form field would be totally inapproriate, I would prefer that my shopping cart not make me look the fool for asking.
This became apparent with the Tax ID field. There is no appropriate reason for a company in South Africa, to even ask for that information of a company in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The user form DEFAULTS to South African Rand as the currency... When the user is clearly not going to be accustomed to transacting anything but $US. Again, an issue of dynamic content not being properly implimented.

The selection of products to be added to the catalog, did not allow for selecting multiple unique items, and then adding them all to the cart at once. I had to wade through 3 screens, for each of 3 items before I could add the three softwares I wished to buy to the cart. Two of the pages I had to wade through were essentially identical in content. It was a wasted extra step between the customer and the purchase. I had to waste this extra step three times, which I would not expect a customer to tolerate. This is pure poison to capturing an impulse purchase. By the time a customer finished shopping, they would have been overcome by their better reason as well as tangible eneue.

The form suggested that they needed a physical address "for invoicing purposes." While a physical address is a perfectly legitimate field for validating a transaction or arranging carriage, neither makes sense for digital content. I expect my receipt/invoice for digital content to be delivered by email within a very few minutes of the transaction. While I'm almost positive that the shopping cart will actually do this, I do not wish to have my shopping cart software commit this faux pas, suggesting that it will be snail mailed. At the very least this demonstrates poor attention to detail for the representation of his own SC site.

Phone number as a required field...
Someone is going to call Ohio, from South Africa...?
At this point I would EXPECT a customer to become a little uneasy and feel that the question as a REQUIRED field was little more than data mining. In the current atmosphere of internet shopping paranoia about the sensitivity of private information, I expect to be able to set up my shopping cart to request sensible and reasonable required data fields that do not alarm my own customers. I would expect to lose at least 5% of my potential sales at this point just from "Shopper Anxiety."

Payment Gateway... They allow only one. I consider this extremely poor form in as much as I would have appreciated being able to use Paypal or at least be offered the option.
If this is a problem for the author of the extension, why should I believe this is not going to be an issue for me?
This is just one of those circumstances where I would expect the seller to demonstrate their own product in use of this feature. Several postings in the forums indicate that the software "drops the ball" on orders using Paypal and that orders must be manually completed. The forum also claims the issue to be addressed. The implimentation should be evident on the author's own SC site if for no other reason than as a demonstration of the feature at work in a live site.

I'm certain that this is a functional software. I set it up and fed it dummy data for a week to confirm this for myself, but function is only part of what I require. I also require that the software represent me with finesse in the same manner that I would represent myself if I were speaking to a customer on the phone or in person. This extension does not appear to allow the seller to do this without becoming an unwitting member of the developement team.

The seller's own shopping cart demonstrated to me that one of two things is true. Either the software is truly inflexible, or the seller did not take the time to set his own site up to take advantage of Joomla's dynamic nature. Either the software is a poor representation of the seller, or the seller has represented it's facility poorly. Neither scenerio is acceptable for any site I would want to build. Though the software is fuctional, and indeed very nicely featured.

This extension also commits what is in my opinion is the ultimate cardial sin. When uninstalled it failed to uninstall cleanly. I consider this extension a strong but immature software. There are basic issues that would need to be addressed (for which no real answers exist for longstanding questions in their own forums) before I would consider this ready to install on a live site.

I was left with the impression that I was being asked to buy something that the author himself could not demonstrate in action. Bloody poor show. My alternative would have been to spend a large amount of time figuring out which of these are serious issues and which have solutions which are accessible. I have a desire to impliment, not develope, a solution. I was able to find no real assurance that this was the case.

Respect and facility in a digital storefront are almost as important as search rank. The software can be as functional as it is, and still be undesirable as a real world solution.

Owner's reply:
The reason for additional fields on registration is for the hosting sales on my site, and the reason i do not accept paypal payments is that they do not offer support for south african merchants.

Installed this software hoping that it did ALL the wonderful things it said it would do .. NOT!

You can't import/export products with this software, even though it says you can. Kind of a moot point to have it installed.

Maybe with time and maturity it may be something worth trying again.

Owner's reply:
Excel import was improved, this was an issue with register globals, Also people please ask the project team about an issue before posting negative feedback.

This one was tricky - I first tried it at 1.1.7 & several MAJOR features weren't there. The other options (VirtueMart, OScommerce, Zen-Cart, Drupal e-commerce) didn't have my features either.
I rate ECJC highly because it's basically got everything I want. I might switch to Virtuemart later but for now, ECJC is the best.
- Lots of shipping/payment modules available. Most templates work fairly well *though a couple RT themes present troubles*
-There's a good community surrounding ECJC and the "commercial" license isn't onerous, it's open source and $15 to disable the ads.
-The developer seems pretty responsive to support queries. I'm eagerly awaiting 1.1.9 to put into full scale production, it allows customers to purchase without an account.

Note: VirtueMart 1.1 will have purchase-without-account functionality too!