There are many other open source, PHP-based shopping cart software available. If you are running an online shop, you may be using one of those shopping carts. If that is the case, you may be wondering how to use that shopping cart with your newly built Joomla! site. It may even be that you have been running a Joomla!-based web site for long time, and now want to implement a shopping cart. The first choice for implementing such a shopping cart will definitely be the VirtueMart. However, if you think that you must use some other shopping cart, such as Zen Cart, osCommerce, or Magento, then you must think beforehand how you are going to integrate the two. The following sections highlight these issues:
osCommerce is a popular open-source, PHP-based shopping cart. It has a large number of modules by which you can easily extend its functionalities. osCommerce has some unique features, such as gift certificates, which are not available in VirtueMart. If you are using osCommerce for your shop, and also want to add CMS functionalities by adding Joomla!, you can try integrating osCommerce shop to Joomla!. For bridging osCommerce and Joomla!, there is a component called oscBridge, which can be downloaded from http://tinyurl.com/65l49d.
You can also get an osCommerce-like shopping cart in Joomla! by using ECJC Online Shop (see http://tinyurl.com/2frgx8) and E-commerce solution for Mambo and Joomla web sites (see http://tinyurl.com/59uopt) components.
Zen Cart is another popular open source, PHP, and MySQL-based shopping cart licensed under GPL. It has some advanced features like osCommerce, and provides ease of administration and customization of its look and feel. Zen Cart's powerful features may prelude you to use it with Joomla! to get most powerful CMS and shopping cart hybrid. However, at this point, there is no easy way to integrate Joomla! and Zen Cart. There are some discussions on how to integrate these two powerful open source software. If your shop is not yet running Zen Cart, it is best to build the shop on VirtueMart. If you are running the shop on Zen Cart, you can still migrate your product catalog to Joomla! by using a Joomla! component called the osCommerce Zen Cart Catalog Import Utility. This component allows you to migrate products from both an osCommerce and Zen Cart catalog. You can download it from: http://tinyurl.com/68pwns.
Magento (see http://www.magentocommerce.com) is the newest open source e-commerce project. It is gaining popularity so rapidly that it is assumed, within a few months, it will surpass the popularity of the osCommerce and Zen Cart shopping cart. Magento's popularity is due to its customizability, usability, and extensibility. It is developer-friendly, as well as designer-friendly. Designers can design their shop frontend as they desire. Similarly, with its extensible code framework, developers can customize it and develop new modules easily. However, up to the writing of this book, there is no easy way to use Magento with Joomla!.
Freeway, available at http://www.openfreeway.org/, is another open source shopping cart which can be used for building an independent online shop. If you would like to use Freeway with Joomla!, there is a bridge called Freeway Integration (see http://tinyurl.com/5qmpcx). This component runs on Joomla 1.5.x and integrates the Freeway shopping cart with Joomla! 1.5.x.