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- Written by: Max Milbers
- Category: About VirtueMart
- Hits: 469211
VirtueMart a Feature Rich Ecommerce solution for Joomla
VirtueMart is an ecommerce extension for Joomla. Easy to use for beginners and experts, it offers thousands of built in features to create your store professionally in some minutes.
Your business is unique. You need a specific feature? It is very easy to extend the functionnalities of VirtueMart by adding Plugins, Components, Templates and Modules to your shop.
Discover the features and the power of VirtueMart
Are you a Customer, a Merchant, a Web Agency or a Developer? Discover the features and the power of VirtueMart depending on your profile.
For Customers
Greeted in your native language
Greeted in their native language, customers feel immediately welcome.
Structure your shop with nested categories
Nested categories help your customer to get a structure of the shop. Different templates and layouts per category can create various look and feel.
Describe your product
Short description gives a fast oversight while browsing the store. Long description is also available for the interested customer on a product details page.
Offer Multiple media to your products
Multiple media (images, PDFs, videos,...) give the customer a good oversight of the product.
Gather your customers feedback
The native review and rating system is enhancing the customer experience and gives them a guideline if the product is the right item for them.
Individualize the shopping experience
Shoppergroups individualize the shopping experience. It can change the price display/format/calculation for them. For example, B2C customer sees the prices with tax, while B2B customers sees the prices directly without tax. Or returning customers directly get a discount of 5%.
Let the shopper choose the product price currency
Multicurrency allows your customers to view products prices in the currency they desire and help him to faster decide if the product is in the desired price range.
Allow your customers to checkout as a guest or create an account
The cart checkout allows to checkout with an account or without. Different templates and/or extensions allow a multipage checkout or one page checkout. The cart can be adjusted to the customers need. If the customers come mainly from a default country, it can be prefilled. This can be done also automatically by IP with an extension for a pocket money. The shipment and payment methods can have different conditions, so that a customer sees only methods that are available for him (by weight, zip, country, currency, payment amount, shopper group and so on).
Returning customers can of course reuse their address. They can also send a product and use as shipment address.
Increase your cross-selling
Add related categories or products to specific product to suggest the customer directly other products. This a great extra service which helps your customer to buy a good set of items (for example a printer and the right toner for it) and increases the sales volume of the merchant.
Customize the account registration
The view, in which the shopper is entering his data, can be easily adjusted to the culture, national laws or just habits of the targeted audience. For example pure B2C shops can remove the company field, while others remove the second name field. A pizza service realised with VirtueMart would remove the country/state field and enter already a city as default.
Powerful SEM/SEO features
The advanced SEM/SEO due meta tags for categories, products, manufacturers, and medias helps the customer to find the wares via search engines. Customers can pass SEF links to friends and can easily find the right tab due the page titles. They mistype a link or use an outdated link? they will get a nice fallback page (for example the regarding category) and the search engines get the 404.
Manage your orders
Orders are always trackable, regardless registration.
Promote your products
Different groups of products like latest, topten, newest, featured give a fast impression and guide the customer to the best offers in the store. All lists are sortable and searchable. Customers can search for products by a certain category, manufacturer, attribute and of course descriptions.
Offer Coupon codes
Customers like to feel important using a coupon or similar marketing tools.
Add new features to your shop
It is very easy to add new features to your shop. Hundred of extensions are available to extend and customize your shop.
For Merchants
Structure your shop with nested categories
VirtueMart offers your shop nested categories as many as your hardware can support. Products can have multiple categories, so your customers can find your products among different topics. Products can also have unpublished categories for calculation rules.
Search engine will love your shop
There are powerful of SEM technics already on board. Meta tags, keys, follow policies, customised page title and more for categories, products, manufacturers, and medias. Even if there are many valid links for just one product, the canonical URL tells search engines the right one. Increase your ranking position by combining meta settings with your product description, media description and manufacturer content. Different media types like video, audio, e-books, give your customers good information and a nice preview and additionally enhance your rating by search engines.
Manage your shoppers
All shoppers are in shopper groups. There exists shopper groups for not logged in users and even they can be pushed in shopper groups. Almost anything is depending on shopper groups and they give you a lot control. Shopper groups allows you to create customised discounts, price display, payment/shipment methods and similar. You have B2B and B2C customers? Not a big deal with shopper groups. You want to give good customers a discount? Add them to a shopper group. You don't want to deal with shopper groups? Then just use the preconfigured defaults.
VirtueMart allows you easily to adjust the shopper input form to your culture, legal requirements or habits of your shoppers.
Control your stock
There is an inventory with stock warning and a virtual stock (ordered but not finally bought).
Products
The product edit allows you to set different attributes, which are used in the shop logic, like
- multiple prices depending on currency, shopper group, amount, etc
- product dimensions (weight, size)
- custom attributes
There are some technics to improve the product editing like product patterns, they allow you to change an attribute for your derivated products within minutes. Product cloning and derivating allows you to create fast a bunch of similar products. Related products help to push your shoppers to fitting products. They are displayed on the product detail view and the add to cart popup.
Create any kind of complex product
Custom attributes allow you to add unified descriptions (searchable) for example the author or functions to your product like dropdowns for a selection, or for a text by the shopper. It can be easily extended with extra plugins and can be used for downloads, uploads, meterware,..
Powerful Calculator
The unified calculator does all the discounts, tax and currency handling. It is rule based and works with different conditions for applying a rule. You can define as rules profit margin, discounts, tax, vattax. Every rule can have its own currency, with automatically updated rates. Just configure the rules and it directly calculates the correct taxes. Even if you have different vat taxes in the cart and cartwide discount. You can use as conditions:
- categories
- shopper groups
- time/date
- delivery address
- manufacturer
- extendable by Plugins (complete takeover by dynamical services like Avatax, or by quantity)
Shipments and Payments
The shipment and payment is done by plugins. A lot of them are delivered with VirtueMart. You need one which is not included? they are easy to install by mouse click. If you miss one, take a look on our store or the JED to find yours. There also a plenty of conditions to create a fine grained system to offer your customers directly the best fitting shipment/payment.
Payments use
- By shopper groups
- Minimal amount / maximal order amount to use a payment
- Transaction fees
- By countries
Payment gateways natively integrated
- Paypal, Klarna, Sofort Banking, Skrill, and Cash on delivery included
Shipments use
- By shopper groups
- Fees
- Based on weight, zip, countries, number of articles, order amount
Let VirtueMart do the invoice for you
VirtueMart does the invoice handling for you. You can define the order status the invoice should be created (depends on your accounting). The history of the order status is logged. You can also modify it to adjust the order to a customer request. You can also use the invoice system for custom jobs.
Manage the access rights for your employees
Use the advantages of the Joomla ACL (Rights management) to define the visibility and editing rights of your employees.
Run a multilingual shop
Use the multilanguage features to expand your business globaly. A language fallback system reliefs you from providing a translation for any product, just market your best.
Add new features to your shop
It is very easy to add new features to your shop. Hundred of extensions are available to extend and customize your shop.
Partners to help you and Services to assist you
VirtueMart partners bring further growth to the community in different ways, like templates specifically designed for VirtueMart, hosting solutions, extended Payment gateways, advanced shipment and tax calculations, database handlers, deeper store management to mention just a few.
VirtueMart offers services to assist you such as support and custom development.
For Web Agencies
VirtueMart is a Joomla component
VirtueMart is a Joomla component and takes full advantage of its framework. Joomla is a very widespread and stable CMS and framework for php components. Around a quarter of all government pages run with Joomla which demonstrate its power.
Joomla provides already a system to install and update new components. It provides already a template, module and plugin system. These can be combined with VirtueMart. For example VirtueMart descriptions can use Joomla content plugins to display videos for example. The languages can be easily adjusted due mouse clicks within Joomla. New templates can be installed within a few mouse clicks and can then use overrides to adjust the shop appearance perfectly to the need of any customer. The module system provides blocks with dynamical filled information, which can be attached to different positions within a Joomla template. The Joomla ecosystem is very big and provides webmasters with free or cheap tools for their page. Backup, Securing, data analytic systems,... http://extensions.joomla.org/.
VirtueMart has a big and international community
The big and international VirtueMart community provides you with a lot information, documentation, tutorials, tips and tricks. Visit our forum to read about solutions provided by community members. Join us on the forum.
Powerful SEM is included
Search engine marketing is a very important feature for a shop. VirtueMart provides for any entity own meta tags, category, product, manufacturer, media, main page. Any page can have its own dynamic generated page title or a customised one. The SEF link system of VirtueMart is fallback safe. For example if a product is not found the customer is redirected to the related category and a message is displayed. Search engines see a 404. We have a similar system for products in multiple categories.
Requires Low Resources Hosting
VirtueMart is very resource-conserving and can handle easily thousands of products on a shared host. There are no artificial limits in VirtueMart. You just need a Joomla prepared hoster for a pocket money to prepare and run the shop. Of course the more customer browsing the store the more resources are needed. Even bigger shops are running well with an average server.
Partners to help you and Services to assist you
VirtueMart partners bring further growth to the community in different ways, like templates specifically designed for VirtueMart, hosting solutions, extended Payment gateways, advanced shipment and tax calculations, database handlers, deeper store management to mention just a few.
VirtueMart offers services to assist you such as support, certifications, and custom development.
Debugging tool
The debugging tools in Joomla and VirtueMart allows you to debug a live store without knowing by the customer.
For Developers
Add new functionalities without touching the core
VirtueMart provides in combination with Joomla an open architecture. The extension system allows it to modify the store deeply without touching the core. The overridable template system of Joomla provides a simple method to customise the css and layouts of any view.
Develop your own extension
The plugin system allows you to extend the shopper fields, the product details and the calculation rules. You can also develop new shipment and payment plugins.
Sell your extension
You wrote a nice extension? sell it directly on our extensions store.
Our extension store gives you the possibility to sell your products without having your own shop. Feel welcome also in our sub board for 3rd party developer and present your product directly to the community.
All Features
VirtueMart features
VirtueMart offers an extensive list of features as standard to enable shop owners to build a working shopping cart. The non-exhaustive list is below:
Extend the functionnalities of your shop
You can extend your VirtueMart shop by adding Plugins, Components, Templates and Modules.
Visit extensions.virtuemart.net for more a list of available extensions.
Based on Joomla MVC framework
Based on Joomla MVC framework with all its advantage:
- Template overriding,
- Implementation of Joomla Plugins for: payment, shipment, coupons, calculation rules, custom product fields, ...
- Simple installation and integration of other Joomla extensions.
Categories
- Nested categories
- With meta tags for seo
- With description and media
Products
- With meta tags for seo
- Short and long description
- Dimensions (weight, size)
- Multiple media
- Variants, attributes
- Unlimited child products and derivated levels
- Product pattern (Parent product used as pattern for child products)
- Related products
- Reviews and ratings
Shopper groups
- Pricing depending by shopper groups
- Price display depending by shopper groups
- Payment/shipment depending by shopper groups
Shoppers
- Customizable shopper input form
- Input form depended on registration, checkout or shipment
- Completely anonymous checkout
- Address book
- Default Bill-to and Ship-to address
- Default payment and shipment method
Inventory/stock
- Stocking/inventory
- Stock warning
- Virtual stock (ordered but not finally bought)
Prices
- Various type of prices to display depended by shopper group
- Prices adjusted by shopper chosen currency
- Different currency format per currency
Real multi currency
- Auto updating rates
- Add your own currencies for fixed currency rates
SEF/SEO
- Default SEF/SEO integrated
Dynamical calculator
- Discounts based on time, category, shopper group, country, and state
- Tax based on time, category, shopper group, country, and state
- Discounts, tax per product and/or order
- Discounts, tax have their own currencies (for duties)
Payment
- Based on plugins
- Minimal amount / maximal amount to use a payment
- Transaction fees
- By countries
- By shopper groups
- included:
- Paypal Std, Paypal Express, Paypal API
- Amazon
- Sofort Banking
- Klarna
- Realex
- Skrill
- Heidelpay
- KlikAndPay
- Paybox
- Authorize.net
- Cash on delivery included
Shipment
- Based on plugins
- By shopper groups
- By countries
- Based on weight, zip, countries, number of articles, order amount
Checkout
- Guest checkout; completely anonymous checkout
- Option to register at begin of checkout
- Cart is an object, completely overridable by template
- Cart is stored in the session
- 1 click checkout
- Multipage checkout
- One page checkout (not by default)
- SSL
Orders
- Payment/shipment workflow
- History
- Modifiable
- Order tracking for anonymous users
Products display
- Latest
- Top Ten sales
- Newest
- Featured
- Sortable
- Searchable
Multilingual
- Native with Joomla 2.5
- With extra Joomla components (joomfish) for Joomla 1.5
Marketing promotion and tools
- Coupon handling
- Recommend a product to friend link
Other
- Hidden debugging tool
- Details
- Written by: Max Milbers
- Category: About VirtueMart
- Hits: 18258
The VirtueMart team offers now a Vm2Go, SaaS solution by Stratus5. You get a installed joomla with virtuemart. A special distribution of the virtuemart team. The pages are hosted in a german cloud.
Please feel free to test our offer
- Details
- Written by: Valérie Isaksen
- Category: About VirtueMart
- Hits: 11193
I'M TOTALLY NEW TO THIS. WHERE SHOULD I START?
Joomla! is a Content Management System (CMS). It can be installed on your webserver and enables you to manage your whole website online (dynamic website!). If you need more basic information, it is recommended to visit the official website. JoomlaCode After you have informed yourself about the basics, you should download Joomla! and install it on your webserver. On joomlacode.org you can download the latest and older versions of Joomla! and other popular extensions.
Joomla! Help Site The installation process for Joomla! is pretty easy and can be done even by non skilled persons. However - there is a very good documentation available covering all aspects of the system.
Joomla! Forum Most of the Problems users have are related directly to Joomla!. If you still have questions or if you are searching for help from the community, you maybe want to join in some discussions in popular forums.
Joomla! Extensions Directory This is the official Joomla! Extensions Directory Site. If you are searching for a forum, a gallery, content modules, flash thingies or such, you should take a look at extensions.joomla.org.
- Details
- Written by: Soeren Eberhardt-Biermann
- Category: About VirtueMart
- Hits: 303381
VirtueMart is a project powered by a very small team, but an ever growing community, and depends on people volunteering time, code, money, and energy to keep it going. This page will help you if you are interested in supporting the project in any way.
The best way to support the project is to:
- Membership/Donating
- buy extensions from our extensions website
Donating
VirtueMart itself is free of charge, but there are a lot of things that require a lot of money - like server hosting, developer software, developer wages and financing public meetings (like the VirtueMart or Joomla! conferences). We removed the donation option. Instead we offer now a membership model, which grants some advantages for you.
Support
VirtueMart would not be where it is today without having attracted a community where the philosophies are shared about the work involved. Everyone who has developed new features and updated work greatly benefits the project and community, and allows anyone to participate to have the next step taken in improving the work in ways not originally thought of.
The greatest success a project could ever have is to have a self supported community, where community members help each other out and welcome those new to the project who end up happily helping others out like themselves too. There are currently more than 300.000 registered members on our support forum, having written more than 250k posts and 60k topics!
Write Contributions!
Everyone who starts an online-shop with VirtueMart will sooner or later modify the code and enhance his shop somehow. Share your modifications! All users of VirtueMart need more
- payment modules
- shipping modules
- images (other than the default ones)
You can easily begin writing your own modifications after having read the Developer Manual (see Documentation).
We have a board dedicated to modifications, "hacks" and "tweaks" (Board Link), where you can post your code and additional files as an attachment.
Just share your code with others!
Documentation
Everyone can help with the documentation effort even if you know little about how certain features work. In fact, writing documentation about such tasks may be better accomplished by those who know little about it. You can post your small tutorials to the Forum or just send them to us via email.
We also have a small FAQ Section in the developer Wiki where everyone can contribute informaton.
You can also help with the User Manual and the Developer Manual -
- fill empty sections
- translate the documents into your language
- correct the documents
- check the documents if they are still recent
You can download the source of those documents, which are written in the DocBook XML format. Using the XMLMind XML Editor for WYSIWYG editing is recommended. To convert the DocBook sources to a usable output format like pdf / HTML / chm you can use eDe (Win) or XMLMind FO Converter (all OS).
Bug Fixing
Help speed up the development of the project by taking care of bug reports at the Feature & Bug Board.
Linking
Just like any other project, VirtueMart lives mostly through the attention of many active and passive fans. You can help increase the attention of our audience by leaving the "powered by VirtueMart" image on the shop front end which links to this site.
Live Shops
Share your online-shop with the rest of the world at the Live Shops section, which currently has more than 2000 entries and is growing each day!
You can easily add your Shop by registering at this site and following the link "Submit new Bookmark" on the Live Shops section.
- Details
- Written by: Soeren Eberhardt-Biermann
- Category: About VirtueMart
- Hits: 694380
Features VM1
VirtueMart offers a lot of Features, some of the standard Features are listed here. Please note that you can extend the Functionality of Joomla! and VirtueMart using Plugins, Components, Templates and Modules to make them do what you need!
Don't forget to visit extensions.virtuemart.net for more Features & Extensions.
General Features
- capable of using Secure Sockets Layer (https) Encryption (128-bit)
- flexible Tax Models
- Model 1: ShipTo Address-based Tax Calculation
- Model 2: Store Address-based Tax Calculation
- Model 3: EU Mode (Store Owner based Tax Calculation when Customer comes from an EU Country)
- Shoppers can manage their User Accounts (registration required)
- Shipping Address Management (Customers can enter their own Shipping Addresses)
- Order History: Shopper can view all their previous Orders (and Order Details)
- Order Confirmation Mail (customizable!) is sent to Shopper and Store Owner
- Multiple Currencies (you can allow Customers to change the Currency and buy using an alternative Currency)
- Multiple Languages (using the Joomla! Component Joom!Fish or Nooku).
Product Catalog Features
- Powerful Web-Administration Interface (Javascript-powered)
- Manages an unlimited Number of Products and Categories
- Can be used as a Shop or just as an Online-Catalog (you can even turn off Price Display)
- quick Search for Products, Categories and Manufacturers; filter by features or discounted Products
- Product Ratings & Testimonials (moderated or auto-published)
- feature specific Products by setting them "on special"
- Product Availability: show how fast a Customer can expect delivery
- Handles downloadable Products (virtual Goods)
- "Product is back in Stock"-Notification for subscribed Customers
Administration Features
- multiple Images and Files (like Spec Sheets and Flyers) per Product
- Product Attributes (like Size or Color) can be added to Product
- Product Types for Classification (like "Car", "Motorbike" or "Music Album")
- Shopper Groups for Customers (allows different Price Levels and Payment Options),
- multiple Prices per Product (Quantity-based and/or Shopper Group-based Prices)
- flexible Price Display (number & currency formatting; including or excluding tax)
- On-the-Fly Price Conversion between different Currencies using Live Rates from the ECB or other banks
- Shop Statistics / Control Panel with a Summary of new Customers, new Orders....
- Stock Level Control for Products and Item
- Order Management with Order History, Customer Notification and Order Edit Functionality
- basic Reporting Feature: sold Items, monthly/yearly Revenue
- Order Status Management
- manage different Currencies, Countries & States
Payment Modules
- capable of live Credit Card Processing
- pre-defined Payment Gateways like authorize.net®, PayPal, 2Checkout, eWay, Worldpay, PayMate and NoChex
- extend your Shop with other Payment Modules using the Payment Module API!
Shipping Modules
- flexible Shipping Carriers and Rates Configuration
- Live-Shipping Rates using Shipping Modules (e.g. InterShipper, UPS, USPS, FedEx or Canada Post; Modules can use the Shipping Rate API).
- extend your Shop with other Shipping Modules using the Shipping Module API!