VirtueMart vs WooCommerce are great and reliable platforms for owners to run their eCommerce stores. If so, which one should you get for your business plan? To have an optimal solution for your site, don’t miss our detailed reviews below.

In this blog, LitExtension – #1 Shopping Cart Migration Expert will compare WooCommerce vs VirtueMart in some basic concerns:

Right now, let’s discover more about VirtueMart and WooCommerce with us!

VirtueMart vs WooCommerce: A Quick Glance

Before having detailed reviews about VirtueMart vs WooCommerce, you can take a look at their background for overall evaluations.

What is VirtueMart?

VirtueMart is an eCommerce extension for Joomla – a famous open-source Content Management System (SMS). With VirtueMart, you can consider a broad range of features to satisfy different business needs effectively. Basically, VirtueMart can be considered an advanced version of Joomla, but easier to use with additional eCommerce functions.

Pros

Provide excellent payment methods
Be free to download
Deliver user-friendly and SEO tools
Offer powerful eCommerce functions

Cons

Require basic technical skills
Have configuration-relating errors to connect with Joomla 5 (eg. Error 500)

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is an open-source and free plugin – powered by WordPress. It allows you to easily run an eCommerce business with powerful functions, especially additional extensions or modules.

WooCommerce introduction — WooCommerce Introduction

Up to now, WooCoomerce 8.4 is the latest version, launched in December 2023. With this version, users have more control over customer carts, templates, as well as product filters. It is great to enhance your WooCommerce store’s efficiency in the e-Market.

Pros

Offer high customization on design
Access to WordPress SEO tools
Integrate with various plugins
Be free to download

Cons

Require high technical skills
Limited customer support

VirtueMart vs WooCommerce: A Detailed Comparison

To help you have a deeper understanding of both platforms, we will compare VirtueMart vs WooCommerce in major concerns. They include ease of use, theme collection, apps, integrations, pricing plans, SEO & marketing, and customer support. Right now, don’t miss our detailed reviews below:

#1. Ease of Use

Quick verdict: WooCommerce has the advantage in this comparison due to providing user-friendly tools through WordPress.

WordPress is the most popular CMS, allowing users to develop their websites with the support of powerful features. On the other hand, WooCommerce is a plugin of WordPress. Thus, you can similarly access this platform in the way you work with WordPress. That’s why when you have a well-run WordPress site, WooCommerce is not a matter to you.

Besides that, WooCommerce delivers business owners a user-friendly interface through WordPress Dashboard. Thus, you can easily build up and control your online store.

To use VirtueMart, users need to first download Joomla for additional customizations. However, Joomla is not an easy CMS to use, which requires some advanced technical skills to experience. Additionally, when owners operate VirtueMart, some of them find its configuration more complex than WooCommerce. That’s why we consider VirtueMart might be a challenge for users who are not familiar with Joomla.

#2. Design & Themes

Quick verdict: Between WooCommerce vs VirtueMart for theme collection, WooCommerce seems to have more benefits than the other due to its better-modified options, and more field groups to select.

When it comes to designs and themes, VirtueMart vs WooCommerce offers a wide collection of options. If so, which platform will be favored for you to run?

At VirtuePlanet Templates, you can find creative VirtueMart themes, with regular updates to help users easily and effectively build their stores. However, VirtueMart templates charge you a certain fee to experience and require compatible customization to run on Joomla.

WooCommerce provides business owners with eCommerce-valued themes. To save your budget, you can try one of 3 free themes available in the WooCommerce Theme Store, including Deli, Storefront, and Boutique. You can also find the best WooCommerces from other sources, like WordPress Plugin Directory or third-party parties.

Besides that, WooCommerce themes are highly evaluated for appealing and trendy designs, which are categorized into various groups to select. This feature makes it more outstanding than VirtueMart – a platform focusing on a solid foundation.

#3. Extensions & Integrations

Quick verdict: Both WooCommerce vs VirtueMart bring users wonder experiences in additional extensions.

In Woo Marketplace, you can find a wide collection of extensions to support your business operations. If you want to focus on eCommerce values for your store, you can consider some powerful tools, like Email Customizer Pro, Putler Connector, or Cashier. All of them are easy to integrate with your WooCommerce structure to attain the finest results.

Similarly to WooCommerce, VirtueMart also provides you with a lot of extensions, each covering from one to a few outstanding features. If you want to add these plugins to your VirtueMart store, don’t forget to check prices and relevant conditions. For example, some additional extensions don’t match your current Joomla version, causing unexpected mistakes.

So overall, if you prefer user-friendly interfaces with an extension library, you can opt for WooCommerce as a smarter solution.

#4. eCommerce Features

Quick verdict: Both VirtueMart vs WooCommere provide powerful eCommerce functions, we believe that WooCommerce comes out as the winner for delivering many fee options to help users optimize their budget.

eCommerce features are considered the most important factors when running online stores for merchants. Below are some of our evaluations about this concern between VirtueMart vs WooCoomerce.

4.1. Inventory management

Business owners easily manage products’ quantities and stocks with inventory reports provided by WooCommerce. It is beneficial for you to have timely relevant modifications, aiming to better inventory control. If you want to expand your management scale, you can consider adding support extensions from the WordPress Plugin for new experiences.

Joomla VirtueMart allows you to adjust stock values quickly, and transfer existing stock among various stores effectively. However, we highly recommend you integrate VirtueMart with a third party to bring out the finest results in your business performance. Some useful solutions can be listed, such as eQuate POS, Advanced Inventory for VirtueMart, and SphereWMS.

4.2. Shipping

WooCommerce delivers 3 shipping methods, including free shipping, flat rate, and local pickup. Let’s consider the kinds of products or shipping destinations carefully to establish respective shipping policies for your customers. Additionally, business owners can use Shipping Classes to categorize products into distinctive groups, each with a proper shipping rate.

VirtueMart has default fields to handle shipping, including ZIP, VM shipment, countries, and By weight to help you easily set up proper price rates for each product. To display more shipping methods, you can navigate from Shipping Module List in Joomla Admin to get the most optimal option.

4.3. Payments

Customers can make payments with your WooCommerce store’s products with both debit and credit cards. Besides that, WooCommerce offers you a broad range of payment gateways, such as Stripe, PayPal, PayFast, Square, and so forth. All of these payment plugins are free to download, easy to set up, and don’t cost you any maintenance fee.

VirtueMart also offers you 13 payment plugins, such as WorldPay UK Plugin, Stripe, CyberMut – Monetico, etc. However, you need to pay a certain fee to install these plugins for your VirtueMart store, except for Komfortkasse.eu. That’s why we don’t recommend you experience transaction activities on VirtueMart.

4.4. Analytics

To have detailed estimations about your current store status, you can get WooCommerce Analytics – relating information. They can include revenue, products, orders, downloads, taxes, categories, and stock.

By contrast, VirtueMart is not highly evaluated for analytic functions. However, if you buy BIT VirtueMart Google Analytics for your store, you can track visitors to enhance your site performance effectively.

#5. Pricing

Quick verdict: In this comparison, we find it difficult to select the winner between VirtueMart and WooCommerce.

Both VirtueMart and WooCommerce are free to download and install. Nevertheless, you should consider maintenance costs, like SSL, hosting, a domain name, extension fees, etc.

WooCommerce also has Woo Express, a perfect combination of SaaS and open-source WooCommerce. It means that you can directly manage your WooCommerce store through the Woo Express site. There are 2 pricing ranges:

Essential Plan: $39/month (or $25/month when paying annually)
Performance Plan: $70/month (or $45/month when paying annually)

(*) Please note that below, we will only talk about WooCommerce open-source pricing.

Below is our table to compare VirtueMart vs WooCommerce in pricing plans.

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From that, you have an overall evaluation of the pricing policies of VirtueMart vs WooCommerce. Due to free and open-source solutions, both platforms cost business owners a significant fee to maintain their stores effectively. That’s why we can’t consider an estimated payment for you when using VirtueMart of WooCommerce, depending on which extension you select.

#6. SEO & Marketing

Verdict: Regarding SEO and marketing concerns, we believe that WooCommerce is a better platform to consider for your online store due to its user-friendly and powerful features.

WooCommerce owns built-in SEO functions, allowing you to easily improve your site’s rankings on search engines like Bing or Google. In particular, you can access content editing, 301 redirects, permalink, and plenty of SEO plugins. Besides that, WooCommerce also provides discounts, coupons, and email marketing available to encourage your visitors’ shopping.

VirtueMart is known as one of the good SEO optimization solutions for your site, however, it is not user-friendly to experience. Normally, you need to install additional Marketing extensions to improve your site’s traffic effectively. We will recommend common options, like AwoCoupon Starter, Customer Who Bought, or JCE plugin. Not like WooCommerce, most plugins will charge you a certain fee to run your marketing plans.

#7. Support

Verdict: We think that there is no remarkable difference between VirtueMart vs WooCommerce about their customer support services.

Both WooCommerce and VirtueMart are open-source platforms, which can’t access you with their support team by live chat. Nevertheless, you can find useful suggestions for your store’s problems in WooCommerce or VirtueMart Forums. Additionally, let’s visit VirtueMart Docs or WooCommerce Docs to get detailed instructions relating to your store’s installation and operations.

Which Platform Should You Prefer?

With WooCommerce and VirtueMart reviews above, we believe that WooCommerce is a more impressive solution to adapt to your online store. However, if you are running a small or medium-sized business, VirtueMart is among the best WooCommerce alternatives to optimize your site’s performance.

On the contrary, with a huge extension library, WooCommerce allows users to approach more powerful tools to expand their store’s size in the long term. That’s why we consider that WooCommerce is especially proper for large business owners to gain commercial value in the e-market.

If you want to discover more about how to use this platform, let’s take a look at our WooCommerce review for detailed information.

In case you want to migrate your current VirtueMart store to WooCommerce, LitExtension can support you. We can offer a full VirtueMart to WooCommerce migration, helping you have a well-structured store on a new platform.

WooCommerce and VirtueMart – FAQs

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Conclusion

Our blog has just compared VirtueMart vs WooCommerce in important concerns, such as SEO & marketing, eCommerce features, pricing plans, and so forth. Basically, we think that VirtueMart will be an ideal solution to run a small business. By contrast, you can adopt WooCommerce to expand your store’s size effectively.

LitExtension, #1 Shopping Cart Migration Expert, hopes you have a proper solution between WooCommerce vs VirtueMart. Check out our LitExtension Blog or join our Facebook Community Group for more useful tips.