Joomla Chicago CMS Group

Hi Fellow Joomla-ers! Have a question for you - I'm tackling two new ecommerce website projects and am trying to learn more about magento and freeway. I need to get these web stores up and running soon so I have to do a quick evaluation and get a plan of action. And I was hoping you might have some experience, knowledge about these newer ecommerce options, support contacts, etc. I'm a newbie by the way - so keep that in mind

Right now I was thinking Virtuemart, freeway or magento.

I'm wondering whether the store should be a stand-alone - not integrated with Joomla? (except for VM)

VM: Maybe I should give VM another chance - but I didn't care much for the virtuemart implementation in a recent site of mine - A bit too complicated for my client and the products aren't well spaced/images missing. Also, customers have abandoned their carts nearly half the time.

Freeway: I loaded freeway and have a sample site online. Its looking pretty slick so far but I've not done any payment integration.

Magento: I'd also consider magento too - but it looks a bit complex to bridge (jfusion) to link with Joomla. Magento site has a large number of support offerings making me worry it will be hard to maintain.

Thanks in advance -
Karen

Karen,

How many products do you have in your store(s)?

VM is nice, but theres still alot to be desired if you plan on running a big store and need more options. Ive been playing with Magento and I really like it. Theres a big learning curve out there, and there isnt much offered to help a newbie learn the software besides reading the user guide (videos would be great).

My advice would be:
1.) If you have a smaller store (200 or less products i guess), VM should be fine.

2.) If you plan on upgrading down the road, and have some time, I'd go with Magento.

I havent messed with jbridge yet, but what kind of issues are you having?

I like VM with Joomla 1.5. Design issues can readily be solved with css know how. We're still waiting though on CSV improved reporting for VM 1.1+ which means reporting is not fully functional and requires digging back through tables in phpmyadmin, not really hard if you know the admin environment.

I'd be interested seeing just how hard the bridging process is in a production environment with joomla/magento.

Follow up
I posed this question at the CMS Winter Expo earlier this month and the consensus was that the Magento as a standalone was preferred approach, rather than bridging to Joomla - when the client simply wants an online store. The rationale is that simple cms functionality is already available within the magento product - no need for the combined solution.

What we did: Driven by time-crunch issues, we used a commercial Interspire shopping cart for the first customer and they are pretty pleased with it. For them the solution needed to have a simple back-end and they're finding it is easy to navigate.

Still plan to work with Magento in the future.

definitely would be interested in reading the 'executive summary' of the magento experience.

i think vm with joomla 1.5, even with the reporting annoyances, is production grade and allows itself for 'easy to install' capitalism that can be readily combined with the community/interactive core joomla extensions with a little bit of futzing.

from the folks at csv improved: "The soft deadline for the release of CSV Improved 1.5 is early december 2008."