VirtueMart is a complete eCommerce solution. It must be used together with the Content Management System Joomla!. Both are released under the GNU General Public License, which means by the end, they are free for download and use. Joomla! and VirtueMart are written in PHP and made for easy use in a PHP / MySQL environment. All you need is to download the latest Joomla distribution from www.joomla.org and the VirtueMart package from this site. Joomla provides the Core System and the Framework, which VirtueMart can use. So you can easily use a complete Shopping Cart Solution within your own dynamic Website ("Portal"), together with many other Plug-Ins, called Components and Modules, like Forums, FAQ, Guestbooks, Galleries........
Notes :
The more, the community (you most often find a solution to your problem simply with Google search), its library of add-on extensions, and its ease to make a specific dress up your shop. The least, the management of variants is more difficult to take in hand than with hikashop, but for example, the text-specific variant at the item level is without the basic version VirtueMart while it is in the business version of Hikashop.
