In this episode of the Joomla Beat Podcast we have a long interview with Max Lynam from MoleHill Web Works. He talks to us about an e-commerce option for Joomla called MijoShop.
He talks about his many years of experience in working with other e-commerce platforms including Magento and how MijiShop differs from them and why it might be the best option for Joomla at the moment.
Show Notes
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Scott Greenwald from http://joomladirect.com Tim Plummer from http://www.tamlyncreative.com.au/software/ Interview with Max Lynam
Max Lynam is from MoleHill Web Works and is an expert in the world of e-commerce platforms, specifically MijoShop.
For about 12 months we have had Opencart available in Joomla, this is great because it has long been an issue in Joomla finding a true e-commerce platform. MijoShop allows us to have complete e-commerce functionality integrations with joomla extensions. It also ships with more functionality.
There are so many options within MijoShop, for example, shipping and payment options. Which can be simple turned on and off with active/non-active switches in the backend of the website. It also integrates PayPal easily, just put in your PayPal email address it automatically can calculate costs and everything else for you.
It is significantly cheaper, with pricing for opencart extensions at 1/10th to 1/20th of the cost of similar extensions for Magento. As businesses grow, so does administration, so integrating other 3rd party packages such as One SAAS. Allows for the business to focus on growing their business instead of concentrating on the administration side of the store.
It does integrate with MYOB, Xero Integrations & cloud accounting packages.
Background
I've been playing with websites for 20 years. A few years ago, I was running a mid sized business using e-commerce solutions for online marketing and forming a big part of the overall sales process. Having had experience in Drupal and Wordpress, I now have a wide range of experiences.
In the early days I used Zen Cart, which is available to the opensource community. The data integrity in Zen Cart wasn't as good as we wanted it to be. So we moved onto Magento after that, running multiple sites on multiple servers, with very extensive magento builds. After that, we shifted to MijoShop, which has 98% of Magento functionality, but doesn't take up as much memory and is easy to use.
Recommendations on E-commerce platforms for people out there who want to set up an online store.
Provide solutions for businesses as a whole. MijoShop is designed as a complete offering for people. If it is not a tangible product then MijoShop isn't suitable, such as selling apps. It can be useful for books and downloads as you can add the files into the backend of the site.
3 Tips in Setting up Joomla MijoShop:
Follow the instructions on the internet on how to use MijoShop. It is invaluable. Think about the journey people take when landing on the website. How you can best help them find and purchase what they are looking for. Testing! Make sure everything works properly. Be a problem customer during the testing. Try and break the process, fix problems before they happen. Find Max online
Website: http://molehill.com.au Twitter: @maxonthehill
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