What Are Virtues and Vices of VirtueMart?

VirtueMart is an open source e-commerce solution that is commonly used with CMS Joomla! Designed like a shopping cart plug-in for Joomla! it reduces the installation and setting up to just several clicks.
VirtueMart is one of the most popular shopping carts nowadays and is used by many store owners. To be more precise VirtueMart is the world’s third eat among all e-commerce solutions.

Interface and Design

First of all, let’s consider interface and design. Both front-end and back-office are really user-friendly. Admin panel was designed very ergonomically and intuitively. All important options can be found on the first rows of the left-sided menu. Moreover, you can navigate in back-end effortlessly through control panel with big icons for every menu item. VirtueMart also offers you to browse the statistics by just one click.
The design of your store will be pretty simple and at the same time very functional. All product details and images are properly placed so that your customers understand where they can find necessary information. A big green Add To Cart button will let you sell your products faster and easier.

Checkout

After a customer passed the registration and selected an item to buy, it is necessary to confirm the purchase. During checkout a purchaser needs to select a shipping method, payment method and press Confirm Purchase. Though there is no one-page checkout it is pretty simple and fast. Moreover, you can also buy an item even if you are not registered, i.e. as a guest.

Update

It is very easy to update your VirtueMart to the latest version. Developers added an option to main menu that signalizes when the new version is available for update. The process is very simple, as you only need to press update button.

SEO

VirtueMart possesses powerful SEO tool. Meta information block, including meta title, meta description, meta robot, meta key, will help your products to be indexed by search engines faster and more efficiently.

Translations

VirtueMart is translated into more than 20 languages. VirtueMart store owners can lead their business all over the world and become more and more successful day by day.

Product Management

The first feature of products management to be reviewed is Mass Associate Categories. This tool can swiftly match a number of products to one or several categories. You can do the same with the products and shop-groups. VirtueMart also offers you to create and manage parent and child products.
Speaking about VirtueMart import/export tool, it doesn’t exist at all. This is a real disadvantage. Store owners need to use different modules that import only csv to VirtueMart. If you want to import, for example, xml to VirtueMart you can try Free Demo Import of your csv, xml, txt or xls.
If you have custom fields you can simply add them to your products. Color, memory or other additional information will help your customers to know more about an item.

Summary

VirtueMart possesses and offers all features that a store owner needs. Great usability with nice front- and backend design, powerful SEO, product management, and many more will certainly increase the already huge VirtueMart users community. Definitely, the lack of built-in import/export tool is a drawback, but it can be easily resolved by using a data import service.