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I have used redshop for 3+ months now and this is by far the most featured cart on the joomla platform today (and i've tested ALL of them). It does a lot of things to accommodate a lot of different workflows and payment processors. Because of all these features, it can be a little daunting to get a handle on it but it quickly becomes easier once you are familiar with the concepts.

Features are one thing but what is most critical for a shopping cart is the support. After all, if you are using a shopping cart, it's to make money on your site and if your cart is not working, you get no money. It's an extremely simple and critical equation!

I have been more than impressed with the redshop support. Their forums are very active and Marcus, Vandana and the rest of the team are VERY present and answer most threads very quickly. Now, yes, some threads sometimes get missed but if you look at the actual volume of support threads, then you understand why. Rest assured that if you have a major problem, the support truly kicks in and actually logs into your site and makes fixes/configuration changes on the spot! I know of very few extension developers that will actually do this. Once, the owner of the company even spent 2 hours with me on Skype and created a test account on their ISP to troubleshoot a very strange server issue I was having (all that at 10PM his time and from his home!!!).

I was using "the other" cart for more than a year before and I just could not handle it anymore. Pretty much no support, many bugs left unfixed, non-existant development rate, etc... and the customization & maintainance was just hell.

Is redshop the perfect shopping cart? No - but it's the best one available for Joomla today and is actively being developed and again, most importantly, well supported (even free version gets the same forum supports)

On a side note: if you think that 249 Euros a year is too expensive for a shopping cart then you are obviously not running a real business. If you are running a real business then think of the 249E as buying support, development and the peace of mind of knowing that if you had a problem, it would get fixed fast. Community support is a wonderful thing for many components in Joomla but a shopping cart is a critical component. You want an actual company to stand by it and help it's users. Redcomponent does.

(and I've not even gotten into the super easy templating, email configuration, and many many other features!)

@olivierk