Native e-commerce coming to a Joomla! near you!

Written by Arno Zijlstra Saturday, 14 November 2009 16:35

Until now there hasn't been a real effort to create a Joomla! 1.5 native e-commerce platform but that's about to change. While there is an enormous need for such a system it is also a huge task to build. E-commerce is something different than running a website presenting content, it involves things like inventory and catalog management, customer management, payment handling and strong analytics options.

I've been involved in serious e-commerce quite a bit at a company that ran a whole portfolio of large stores with many millions of revenue and have learned that e-commerce isn't just simply putting some products online and wait for customers to come by. E-commerce is a very active task and requires dedication and active marketing efforts to get the most out of your sales process. An important part of this overall active store management are the tools you have available to run your store, the e-commerce platform.

Dioscouri is a well established name in the Joomla! world for delivering great products and with those products a very solid support process. They've taken up the task to build the first Joomla! native full featured e-commerce platform and I've been talking to Rafael and Vika who lead Dioscouri about this platform extensively and I'm very exited about it.

The platform will come to you in two flavors, a free version with a limited but still great feature set for small shops is set to be released in January 2010 and an enterprise version which has everything you need to run a medium to large store is set to be released a couple of months later. The system is build to allow custom features being added and integrated easily which gives it unlimited possibilities to scale when your online business is growing and demands change. This e-commerce platform called Tienda on top of or besides Joomla!'s CMS functionality and especially Joomla!'s easy and flexible template engine will open a whole new world for people looking to run stores online and create a great customer experience.

If you want more information, Rafael did a presentation on the system at the latest NY JUG and is blogging an introduction movie series at the Dioscouri.com blog. You can also follow him on twitter @dioscouri

About the author Arno Zijlstra

Arno Zijlstra is the creative mind and founder of alvaana.com development lab for the web. He is one of the original founders of the Joomla! Open Source Content Management System and has been involved in a couple of other Open Source projects. His passion is creating sites and interfaces that look different and are built with accessibility, usability and web-standards being truly important. Always on the look out for new things and open to learn from anyone, anytime.

Follow me at http://twitter.com/me_arno

More about Arno Zijlstra

There are 5 comments posted.

# 1 - Posted by: apotropaic on 2009-11-14 19:35:07

This comes as a shock to me. Why not help virtuemart in their new efforts to convert to native joomla framework instead? Why do we need to have more then one large ecommerce solution when if joined forces with virtuemart you could get so much done. This is a big problem for joomlas community.

# 2 - Posted by: Nathan on 2009-11-14 20:02:51

Waste of time... Vm is a solid solution

# 3 - Posted by: Arno on 2009-11-14 20:09:40

Hello apotropaic,

I agree with you that such a problem exists for Joomla! but this counts for area's with many of basically the same products and that's certainly not the case for e-commerce.

VM just announced they are going to do a rewrite on J but you could argue that should have been done long ago and maybe they would have if there was competition no? Tienda is being build for good reasons. Dioscouri is a company that builds extensions of a certain quality and has build a support service over the years they want to be able to give to Tienda customers too.

Personally and read carefully "Personally" I've never wanted to touch VM because I personally think VM's quality is not something I want to deal with or have clients want to deal with but I don't say others shouldn't use VM if they are comfortable with using it. This counts for any software or tool.

To many of the same products in the market isn't good but a little competition in certain area's is good because it keeps the developers sharp which is good for the customer in the end.

Re: Nice

# 4 - Posted by: Jisse Reitsma on 2009-11-15 14:06:46

Nice to hear more competition is coming up. As Arno mentions, competition keeps people sharp. Also, multiple products available for Joomla! (VirtueMart, Magento using JFusion/MageBridge/JMint, Tienda) will give people at least the choice. And different people make different choices.