Virtuemart Expert

… and it was a great success and a wonderful conference. It was a pleasure to meet a lot of interesting people from the Joomla Community in the real world.

From a Virtuemart point of view it was also very good. We had a lot of discussion about Virtuemart and it showed how important Virtuemart is for the Joomla Ecommerce. A lot of people knew about our VMX version and we received 100% positive feedback (as we already have received in a lot of mails – thank you for that btw.).

We have offered a dicussion on the conference about “Joomla Ecommerce” and we didn’t limit it to Virtuemart. A lot of people joined the discussion and – suprise – it turned out to be a 100% Virtuemart audience. We covered a lot of different questions about what to expect from a Joomla Ecommerce System, what the future will bring and what the shopowners  and –builders missed in the past. I personally was very lucky that the guest of the discussion are all confident with Virtuemart and don’t see a reason to change their shopping cart system.

Of course there are always things that could be better – and one important thing is of course the lack of updates in the last 12 months which we want to make better with VMX. We have written down a short list of answers to different questions that may not only be interesting for Virtuemart. We leave the answers uncommented at the moment, but surely will see what we can add to Virtuemart or VMX in the near future!

What do you expect from an ecommerce system:

• Easy for shopowners to use
• Easy for customers to use (frontend)
• Wide range of payment providers (API)
• Easy to connect with ERP-Systems
• Multilingual
• Cover a wide range of tax systems
• Flexible SEO
• Flexible customisation and Layout
• Easy to use batch jobs for different tasks

Joomla specific:

• No need for Joomla 1.0.x compatibility
• Layout should integrate in Joomla template

Virtuemart specific – what could be better:

• Ease of use of the Virtuemart administration
  An idea in the discussion was to configure the pages that are shown to have less options for the shopowner once the shop is configured correctly
• Store the status of views and selections in the backend
  it is a bit annoying in Virtuemart that when you filter the product list for example, edit a product and come back to the list, that the filter is lost. It would also be helpful when the last opened tab in an edit screen would be opened again. Some of these things are already made better in VMX (filters stay active until you reset them)
• More flexible price calculation
• Easier handling of child products and images
• Theme installer

This is just a short overview about the discussion as i have written down the arguments and what is still have in mind. There was a lot more and i would thank the guests of the discussion for this interesting 90 minutes.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (2)