Friday, 03 June 2011 11:20
Why choose Joomla! instead of Drupal or WordPress for your stand alone simple e-Commerce store? Well, Joomla probably has the largest number of e-Commerce components available of the big 3 Open Source CMS platforms. This can be good and bad.
Having choices is good, no?
Trying out five or six components, testing them and then discarding them as not a viable option for your client is time consuming. But, I believe I have found the perfect combination and I will share it with you.
Hikashop is my first choice for any Joomla store. It is easy to modify and all styling and language changes are kept through all their upgrades. It has the standard online merchant portals like Authorize.net, PayPal etc. And one advantage that other products don’t offer as easily as Hikashop does.
The advantage I have found is for clients who have a physical commerce and want to add an online store to their business. They most likely have a credit card terminal in their store, so why pay another $40-60 a month to have an online merchant account?
Hikashop safely allows credit card info to be entered directly on the site. It then gets to your client by diving the credit card into parts, neither of which are ever in the same place. Your client can then put the two halves together and enter them into their terminal. With SSL installed as well, you have a secure solution. Since many small business owners are taking orders and shipping themselves or by an employee this makes perfect sense.
I have seen many small online business owners have orders that take their client to an outside portal (many times never to return) If these 3rd party sites aren’t blended seamlessly it can be bothersome to a potential online shopper. Hikashop is your site no url changes, no hangups just full integration and customer piece of mind.
But the best part is the ease of which it integrates with Acymailing (the best e-mail marketing solution for Joomla!) Your products can now be added to any HTML newsletter or campaign. Acymailing just has so many features it really lets your client take control of their online business!
And even better, HostPress can create this e-Commerce solution for you. Feel free to talk to us about out reasonable rates.
HostPress will be launching a new free service soon... DIY websites. 
I was recently alarmed at the number of gigabytes I was storing on the various hard drives on my home computer (just over 1 TB). I knew it wasn’t just me stockpiling files or something. It was old backups. With the demise of Windows One Care I had some backups I forgot about. Looking closer they represented about 300 gigs of HD space! The problem was trying to delete these gave an access denied message. Just great, I can’t delete these files? Thanks again Microsoft. who owns this computer anyway?
