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If you’re setting up an E-Commerce store on a Joomla website, then you’ll need a Joomla extension and two of those Ecommerce solutions you could be deciding between would be VirtueMart and HikaShop.
HikaShop is a great option for Joomla websites and gives you the ability to do a lot of great things for your store, like:
- Custom fields for user information and products
- Customer invoice display
- Multilingual options
- Checkout without registration
- Contact us form on product pages
- Waiting list for products out of stock
- Inventory handling
- Badges display on specific products
- Ability to have multiple images for a product
- Ability to have product variations
- Ability to have multiple product options
- Related products
- Manufactures support
- Ability to limit product sales by period
- Carousel and sliding/fading effects on products listings
- Comparison system for products
- Ability to filter product listings
- Option to sell products in several currencies
- Currency rate auto update
- Prices automatically calculated based on currency amounts
- No limit on the number of orders
- Invoice display & printing options
- Guest checkout
- Manual shipping methods management
- Ability to easily customize your HikaShop emails
- Custom fields for user, addresses, and order information
- Integration with Google Products
- Integration with AcyMailing for marketing campaigns
- Discounts and coupons
- Discount & coupon restriction ability
- Online documentation & forum
- And more!
VirtueMart is another popular Ecommerce solution and offers customers features like:
- Meta tags for SEO
- The ability to choose multi-variants/attributes for products
- Unlimited child products
- Derivated levels
- Related products
- Reviews
- Ratings
- Dimensions (size, weight)
- Stocking/inventory options
- Quantity based pricing
- Ability to add your own currencies or use fixed currency rates
- Dynamic calculator to calculate taxes or discounts
- Guest checkout
- Multi-page or one page checkout
- PDF invoice
- Display of top ten products sold
- Searchable & sortable product options
- Featured product options
- Coupon handling
- And more!
As you can see, both offer a lot of really great features for Joomla websites and neither are a bad choice. But for me, the difference really comes to ease and price. With VirtueMart, you have to keep adding extensions in order for it to work for whatever you want it, so it can end up more expensive than HikaShop. For example, take Stripe. Stripe is a great way to accept payments, and it is free with HikaShop. But to add a Strip Extension to VirtueMart, it costs about $44. These things really add up over time. And having to keep adding extensions makes the whole process a lot more complicated.
Winner: HikaShop
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