Features of VirtueMart,VirtueMart is a feature-rich, e-commerce component for Joomla! and Mambo. As it is derived from a standalone shopping cart, it has all of the features needed to run an online shop. The following sections highlight the major features of the VirtueMart shopping cart.

General features

As a component of Joomla! and Mambo, VirtueMart is fully integrated with Joomla! and Mambo and shares the common features of Joomla! and Mambo. It uses the security architecture of Joomla! and also has the capability of using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption, up to 128-bit. This encryption of HTTPS communication makes VirtueMart much safer for the buyers and sellers.

In addition to security features, another good feature of VirtueMart is its flexible tax model. In VirtueMart, sales taxes can be calculated based on a ship-to address, store address, or EU mode. In EU mode, taxes are calculated based on store the owner's address when the customer comes from an EU country.

Customers in VirtueMart are registered users of the Joomla! or Mambo site. Once a customer is registered with Joomla! or Mambo site, that user can maintain their addresses, and also can view their order history and order details.

Whenever a product is sold in VirtueMart shop, an order confirmation email is sent to shopper and the store owner. The administrator of the shop can customize the order confirmation mail and other emails sent to customers.

VirtueMart has excellent localization capability. As part of the Joomla! CMS, you can use multiple languages for the Joomla! site and the VirtueMart shop. Once you install and configure the Joom!Fish component for Joomla!, you can use multiple languages for the VirtueMart store, too. There are several language packs for VirtueMart available on VirtueMart's web site: http://www.virtuemart.net. We can download these free of charge, install the language packs, and use them on our VirtueMart shop. However, if we do not find our desired language pack, we can easily translate the language strings using a Language Translator and Joom!Fish component.

As with multiple languages, we can also use multiple currencies for our VirtueMart shop. When multiple currencies are configured, shoppers can view the product price in configured currencies and also buy using those currencies.