Virtualmart – This is a package of solutions (components, plugins and modules) to create online shopping web sites with Joomla . It provides many tools to make an e-commerce solution.

Joomla – CMS (Content Management System) Open Source based in Php and mysql.

We are building a couple of sites using this combination: www.uruguaycompras.net and deportes.universia.edu.uy (coming soon).

In our opinion Virtualmart (VM) is the most complete open source solution to build this kind of sites. After installing Joomla we add the component and a lot of modules and plugins (see the instructions: http://virtuemart.net/documentation/User_Manual/Installation.html)
After that you can configure your virtualmart solution with different ways of payments (e.g. paypal, on delivery, etc.), different providers, different currencies, different vendors and so on.
VM has a complete back-end administrator to manage all the information and all the shopping process.

This picture shows the administrator panel.

From our experience, VM has two problems without solution until now. We expect to solve these issues and share this stuff to all the community.
The problems are:

• multi vendor management – this module is in alpha version to developers. You cannot manage two or more providers. For Instance: we have a site for a reseller company and they sell products of different vendors. VM solution doesn’t consider this situation.
• multi currency solution – VM allows to manage as many currencies as you want (more than 100 for default, and you can also add others if you want). But in the checkout process and in all the shop gallery you don’t have the possibility to show more than one currency.

We expect that in the next two weeks we could have another post sharing these solutions.