VirtueMart vs osCommerce

Many of our customers asked what are the advantages of choosing VirtueMart over osCommerce cs (CRE Loaded, Zen Cart, osCMax) and Magento. Well, here are what we think:

1. Integrated with Joomla CMS, means you can have a shopping cart combined with any other non-cart features such as user forum, news portal, social networking, blogs, any kind of subscription service, ads management, auction site, event management, calendar, image gallery, image slideshow, flash gallery, flash slideshow, virtual classroom, real estate property, hotel reservation, stock market, event registration, wikipedia, etc.

2.  Flexibility is very high in terms of design and layout. You can place any kind of module (cart module, manufacturer module, currency module, search module, flash module, image slideshow module, accordion, sliding, fading, application in module, module in application, etc) to any position you like. You can place a header on footer, footer on header, cart over header, header over cart, sliding, fading, tabs, etc. Position is limited only by your creativity and imagination.

3. SEF and SEO are more superior and free, especially with sh404SEF. We found it much better than osCommerce paid SEO scripts. osCommerce cs are very limited in meta tags optimization while Joomla has a lot of extensions that can maximize your meta tags optimization.

4. Support multi languages. Whilst osCommerce, Zen Cart, CRE Loaded and osCMax only support 3 languages (German, Spanish, English), Magento also supports 3 languages (German, French, English), VirtueMart plus Joomla currently support more than 60 language and they are still developing for other languages around the globe.

5. Security is more superior. Not like osCommerce cs that still use the old crack dangerous register_global ON.

6. Compatible with PHP 5 and MySQL 5 for much better performance and security. If you are building a new web store, you'd better build with the one that is compatible with PHP 5 and MySQL 5 because PHP 4 and MySQL 4 is going to be outdated very soon. osCommerce, Zen Cart, CRE Loaded and osCMax are not compatible with PHP 5 and MySQL 5.

7. Caching technique is much better with Joomla default cache or other Joomla cache extensions.

8. You can create content as many as you want. A content can be an article with animated javascript and images, or a component inside an article, or a module inside an article, or a static HTML pages, or dynamic HTML pages, or a flash inside article, etc etc.

9. Cart features are excellent: Multi vendor, product attributes, product specials, unlimited products and categories, multiple product categories, flexible user fields, edit order, selling downloadable files, complete payment and shipping modules including Google checkout or create your owns, confirmation email, transfer to Quickbooks, catalog or cart, separate price per customer, etc etc.

10. There are still plenty of room for improvements. Whilst osCommerce cs already reached the dead end or maturity stage and not too much room for further improvements, VirtueMart still has plenty of room of improvements.

11. osCommerce cs claim that they have a lot of template designs available to choose from. Well, it's still somewhat true. That's why we are here so that at least VirtueMart has some template designs to choose from either.