VM has its roots in an Open Source Shopping Cart Script called phpShop. This script was developed by Edikon Corp. and the phpShop community (see www.phpshop.org).

VM was forked from phpShop version 0.8.0 at the end of the year 2003. It was maintainend and developed under the name mambo-phpShop until September 2005. In October 2005 it was renamed to VirtueMart.