The easiest case in your store is having a product that is unique and has no variants. But often you need to offer a product in different sizes, colors or other attribute so that your clients get exactly what they want. Sometimes, these attributes have a relationship to the price and sometimes, they have different images and descriptions.

Abricot Jam 250gr or 500gr?

Imagine you are selling home made apricot jam in two sizes, 250gr and 500gr. The 250gr pot is the standard size and costs 4 €. The 500gr pot costs 7 €. You don't want to use the inbuilt stock control system in VirtueMart to manage your jam pot stocks. You just want to offer the different sizes for a different price. The product images and the descriptions are the same.

Create a custom field

To achieve your goal you have to create a custom field. Go to Components -> VirtueMart -> Products -> Custom Fields and create a new field. Choose a name (e.g. pot), as type Cart Variant and Yes for Cart Attribute (Figure 1).

In the last chapter we set up a product in VirtueMart and in the meantime I learned about cultural differences in online shopping compared to traditional shops. The reason is quite simple. The VirtueMart articles are translated to various languages and one of them is Arabic. As you already know Fitou, the village I live in, is known for its red wine but in some countries alcohol is a sensitive topic. So I decided to switch to another product in the Arabic version of the book. The same can happen to your products in your online shop. It can be seen all around the world. On the one hand that's very good because everyone in the world is able to buy something. On the other hand you have to be aware of different cultural habits.

By the way, when you start selling products or services online, you need to verify if your product /service is suitable for being sold online.

Check

• if you need an online help to use your product
• your transportation abilities & costs, compare your total inventory holding costs to the cost savings when using the a method of transport
• if it would be necessary to offer technical support or after sales service?
• if your product adapts to different environments (cultures, climates)?

Today we want to have a look at the buying process and the order management. So far, we have a product, the PayPal payment method, no shipping options and no taxes.

To use VirtueMart you need to install it first and you also need an existing Joomla installation. In our examples we are working with VirtueMart 2.x and Joomla 2.5. If you are not familiar with the Joomla 2.5 Installation, please read the Joomla 2.5 Installation chapter. Joomla 2.5 is the stable branch until summer 2014.

If you want to use VirtueMart in a single language (e.g. German) it is useful to configure your Joomla installation BEFORE the VirtueMart installation to that language too (German).

It is possible to use VirtueMart in a multi language environment. Nevertheless you should use the language VirtueMart was initially installed as "main" language. 

Download and Extraction

Go to virtuemart.net and download the 2.x package (http://virtuemart.net/downloads). A file with the name com_virtuemart.2.0.18a_extract_first.targz.zip will be downloaded to your hard disk.

After extracting the package you find three files