eCommerce Shootout: PrestaShop Vs Joomla VirtueMart! Which One is the Best?
eCommerce is a system for buying and selling goods and services using the Internet as the main medium of transactions. In other words, it is a business that electronically manages the delivery of goods/services and payments.
Types of e-Commerce
- Business-to-Business (B2B): Electronic exchange of products and services between companies. A construction materials company selling its products to architects and interior designers is a good example of the same.
- Business-to-Consumer (B2C): Electronic exchange of products and services between companies and consumers. This is the most common type of e-commerce and there are thousands of examples of clothing, shoes or electronics stores in the domain.
- Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C): Electronic exchange of products and services between consumers, generally through an outsider.
- Consumer-to-Business (C2B): Electronic exchanges of merchandise and services where people offer items or services to companies.
- Business-to-Administration (B2A): Electronic exchange of products and services between companies and open organizations.
- Consumer-to-Administration (C2A): Electronic exchange of products and services between people and open organizations.
If someone wants to sell their own products online, using an e-commerce solution, multiple open sources of e-commerce platforms are available and you can build your website on any of these platforms.
- WordPress (Woo-Commerce)
- Prestashop
- Joomla VirtueMart
- Magento
- Shopify
- Drupal
- osCommerce
- BigCommerce
- Open Cart
- Zen Cart
With dozens of e-commerce frameworks and content management systems, this provides complete control to develop your online market place more secure and comfortable.
Today, we are going to see the difference between Prestashop and Joomla VirtueMart Ecommerce Platforms.
Prestashop:
Prestashop is a purely eCommerce platform designed to help medium-sized and large companies sell their products online. You can add static pages (CMS) and add a free module to the blog. It is easy to download and install. A huge number of both free and paid themes are available. PrestaShop gives you the freedom to modify so that your store design is limited only by your programming skills and imagination. Prestashop is built using the intelligent frame. So, if you know a bit of HTML and CSS, you can crack the design on your own. PrestaShop accounts for more than 250,000 stores worldwide, according to official statistics. It should be noted that PrestaShop has already built-in 500 + features. They contain all the basics that most traders need to start online.
Prestashop is multilingual from the get-go. The CMS is pre-translated into more than 40 languages and employs a type of translation module accessible in the back office.
Features:
- Full-on open source
- Good speed
- 100% scalable and customizable
- Creating templates is simple using the smarty template engine
- Creating templates and modules requires a small learning curve
- Approach to back office is different hence it is not as intuitive as it could be.
- Fairly easy to upgrade
- Many add-ons and templates
- Back office fairly simple to use
Joomla VirtueMart:
VirtueMart began as an offshoot of the stand-alone phpShop e-Commerce web application. Originally dubbed mambo-phpShop it became the first substantial native e-commerce component for the Mambo CMS system. After the community forked Mambo into Joomla, the developer re-branded mambo-phpShop as VirtueMart, officially supporting the newer Joomla CMS. While current implementations may still function with Mambo CMS, and older editions of mambo-phpShop are still available to download, they are no longer actively supported.
VirtueMart supports an unlimited number of products and categories with multiple categories of products. It allowed the sale of downloadable products until version 3. This feature is now largely supported by separate subscription plugins. It offers a catalog mode that turns off the shopping cart functions. VirtueMart supports multiple prices for a single product based on shopping groups or a range of quantities and allows various payment gateways to be used.
Since VirtueMart is an open-source e-commerce solution, all PHP application code can be seen openly. This allows PHP developers to view, update or customize the operation of the shopping cart. In addition, VirtueMart itself offers simplified templates structure that allows various shopping and cart pages to be edited as standard HTML and CSS.
Features:
- Open-source
- Upgrading is easy (unless you modified files you should have not modified)
- Depend on Joomla
- Fewer themes and extensions
- Lesser SEO friendly
- Lack of marketing (newsletter, blog, reporting) native features
- Cannot be used to set up multiple stores
- Community participate lesser in the development
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