How are Joomla shopping carts?

Is it recommended to use a joomla shopping cart?

[emirli_girl]

hi,
does anyone have a joomla shopping cart?
I'm thinking of moving to joomla hosting for my ecommerce site.
The shop is in two languages. Will that work also with joomla?
The Joomla people say yes, but does anyone here have any first-hand experience, tips for me?
thanks,
Marta

[T_Miller]

I love Joomla 1.5 as a CMS and manage 10 or so content sites on that platform. I even do simple, 5-10 page small business "brochure" sites in Joomla as it so easy to work with.

I've also have done sites with joomla running the main site and the "store" in a subfolder or subdomain with similar template design and running my chosen (commercial) ecommerce cart system.

But the integrated Joomla ecommerce offerings (3rd party components) are rather lame, IMO. The only real player is VirtueMart but thing I notice is they tend to stay compatible with 1-2 versions BEHIND the latest Joomla version. That's not something I'm willing to risk with a full blown ecommerce store. I prefer to stay up to date for security reasons.

If you need to list a handful of items say for a small club or something, sure you can find some ecommerce add-on that should work fine. But for full blown ecommerce I want well maintained, often updated, quickly patched, PCI compliant and payment gateway vetted ecommerce package.

[edited by: T_Miller at 1:27 am (utc) on Mar. 25, 2009]

[emirli_girl]

hi,
thanks for the info. The idea of putting the shop in a subfolder is good.
Which cart would you recommend? I need one for two languages and can handle downloads.

[T_Miller]

I know ECT (eCommerce Templates) supports multiple languages and they offer a digital download feature.

Search for other threads as cart systems have been discussed quite often here.