There are various types of components and modules for Joomla! which can be used for e-commerce. Due to a large number of components available, e-commerce in Joomla! is not only limited to selling products, but it can also adopt other forms of e-commerce activities such as running affiliate shops, charging money for access to premium content, running an auction site, and so on. A brief overview of available components for such e-commerce activities are described in the following sections.
Affiliate carts are one form of e-commerce where you show products from other shops or catalogs. Visitors to your shop can browse the products on your shop and buy it from that shop or catalog. You don't need to manage the inventory, fulfill the orders, process the payment, and such things. You get the commissions for each sell you generate through your affiliate store. For example, Amazon has a great affiliate scheme which you may be familiar with.
Joomla! has a number of components for adding affiliate shops to your Joomla!-based web site. The following are some of the widely used affiliate shop components for Joomla!:
- CJ Catalog Builder: This is the Commission Junction catalog builder component for Joomla!. This commercially licensed component works natively with Joomla! 1.0.15, and works as 'legacy' in Joomla! 1.5.x. It is a great component for building an affiliate shop by selecting products from the Commission Junction catalog. The products from Commission Junction can be added to your content, or to VirtueMart's categories and sub-categories. This gives you opportunity to customize the layout of how a product is displayed, and also edit the product description.
- J!Cafe: J!Cafe is a commercially licensed component which enables you to build an affiliate shop using products from Cafepress(the popular online marketplace). This component natively runs on Joomla! 1.0.x and runs in legacy mode on Joomla! 1.5.x. This component allows customer commenting and bookmarking, and also supports search engine friendly URLs. This is a good choice for Joomla! administrators if you want to sell products from Cafepress.
- Easy Amazon Associates: This free component is designed to run on Joomla! 1.5.x. This allows you to include Amazon ads in your content. Once installed and configured, it can generate appropriate codes for your Amazon products.
Paid access to content is another form of e-commerce. If your Joomla!-based site provides premium content for which you want to charge some fees, the following components can help you charge fees to the content, or simply sell access to content:
- Account Expiration Control – Membership Manager: This component allows Joomla! administrators to manage membership for paid content sites. Once the members pay a certain amount of fees, and get membership for a certain period, this component can manage their membership status. The membership is expired if not renewed in due time. This component runs on Joomla! 1.0.x and available for free at no cost.
- Pay to Download XT: If you are uploading files to your Joomla! site and want to charge some fees for allowing viewers to download a file, you can use this component. This will allow you to charge an amount through PayPal against each file download. This free component runs on Joomla! 1.5.x (native) and Joomla! 1.0.x (native).
- DOCman PayPal IPN (Pay Per Download): This component allows you to charge a fee for each download from the DOCman document repository. After installing and configuring DOCman, and uploading your files to DOCman, you have to install and configure this component. It will start showing a Pay with PayPal button. Once customers pay the amount, they will be redirected to the download URL. This simple and easy to manage component runs on Joomla! 1.5.x (legacy) and Joomla! 1.0.x (native).
- Subscription Deluxe: This commercially licensed component allows Joomla! site owners to implement subscription based services for visitors. Subscription may be configured for the entire site, or only part of the site. This component works on Joomla! 1.5.x (legacy) and Joomla! 1.0.x (native).
- JContentSubscription (Pay and Read Content): This commercially licensed component is suitable for implementing subscriptions to news and articles-based sites. When installed and configured, visitors can see the intro text of the news and articles, but they need to pay for viewing the full news or article. With this component, site owners can sell an individual article to individual user. This component runs on Joomla! 1.0.x (native).
There are some billing and invoicing system components for Joomla! which are mostly used for managing subscriptions and recurring billing. The following are two such components (commercially licensed) that can be used with Joomla!:
- nBill - a complete billing system: This component can be used for billing recurring payments. It can generate invoices and record all income, expenditures, subscriptions, and orders. It gives users the opportunity to login and view their invoices online. Several payment gateways can be used to pay the invoices. However, this component does not include shopping carts or product catalog. This is good for selling a few products where an order form can be configured manually from the backend. Another drawback of this component is that some of the files are encoded with ionCube, which means you need ionCube installed on the server for decoding these files.
- jAccounts – Quotes and Invoices: This component is suitable for managing invoices and quotes for service-oriented sites. For example, if you run a Joomla!-based site and provide some consultancy services through that site, you can use it to generate and submit quotes. Upon completion of your work, you can submit invoices to your clients. Clients then pay the invoices online using one of the popular payment gateways, including PayPal, Google Checkout, 2Checkout, and so on.
Auction is another form of e-commerce where sellers advertise their products and customers bid for those products. The highest bidder gets the product. Auctions can also be reverse, where a buyer gives his or her requirements and sellers place their bids. In this case, the lowest bidder wins the bid. You can implement such auction systems in a Joomla! site by using some components. The following are two popular components for auction:
- Auction Factory: This is a complete auction system for Joomla!. It can also be used with Joomla!'s Community Builder component. This component supports all types of auctions, including proxy bidding. It has built-in support for multiple languages and SEF. Its user-friendly administrative interface provides easy tracking of auctions and bids. This commercially licensed component runs on Joomla! 1.0.x (native) only.
- AuctionFun2: This component enables you to add bidding to content items. Each content item in the Joomla! site can be included in bidding. This component is AJAX integrated and supports multiple types of bidding, including Regular (integrated), CountDown, and eBay style (optional). It supports checkouts through PayPal and Moneris. This can also be used for basic integration with the Community Builder component. The drawback is that it only runs of Joomla! 1.0.x.
There are very few shopping cart components for Joomla! which can truly be an alternative to VirtueMart. The components which can be considered as near-to-be alternative to VirtueMart are mostly commercially licensed. The following are some of them:
- JoomShopping Online Shop: This component allows you to run a shop on a Joomla! web site. Besides general products, it can also sell music and video files. It runs on both Joomla! 1.0.x and 1.5.x. One nice feature of this shopping cart is that, besides text and images you can also add audio and video in product descriptions. It also includes search engine optimization, customized PDF bills, and payment providers. The only downside of this component is that it is in German and all texts do not translate into English.
- IXXO Cart for Joomla!: This commercially licensed shopping cart component works with Joomla! 1.5.x (native) and Joomla! 1.0.x. It has some great features for shop owners. It focuses on marketing and selling, and provides a powerful design. This shop can be customized for most of the payment gateways and shipping providers. It has built-in support for search engine friendly (SEF) URLs, multilingual content, customer relationship management, wholesaler management, and easy customization of the look and feel of the store frontend.
- SimpleCaddy for Joomla! 1.5 with PayPal support: SimpleCaddy for Joomla! 1.5 is a small component to add shopping cart functionality to a Joomla! web site. It has very few features which helps building a minimalist shop.
- ECJC Online Shop: This commercially licensed shopping cart component is derived from osCommerce and has most of the functionalities of osCommerce. It runs on Joomla! 1.5.x (native) and Joomla! 1.0.x (native). Comparing the features with VirtueMart, this can be a substitute if you are willing to pay for it.