The Joomla/Virtuemart combination has long been a popular choice for companies wanting to set up a web shop.  Virtuemart had its start as phpShop, was then integrated into the Mambo CMS.  Joomla broke out from Mambo and became the world's most popular CMS.  But the legacy code it brought with it from Mambo was not all good.  The developers did a brave choice: in going forward they wanted lean and modern code that would give a good foundation for the coming years.  So in launching the new Joomla 1.5 they decided to rewrite it from scratch.  This means that components need to be rewritten to fit in.

Behind Virtuemart is basically only one person who leads an effort to maintain this e-commerce software.  Virtuemart also has a lot of old legacy code, and the launch of Joomla 1.5 was a good opportunity to do a rewrite.  But it's not a fun thing to break something that works and do it all over again, introducing new bugs in the process.  So the Virtuemart developers decided to not rock the boat for now.

Maybe they should have.  Because in this transition period a new Open Source e-commerce platform has risen up: Magento.

We can see the rising popularity of Magento in this graph from Google Trends.

As one can see, they are both on the rise, but Magento has had a steeper rise since its launch in 2007.

Should you go for Magento?

It's free (Open Source), it is backed by a company as opposed to some enthusiasts, and it has more features than most of the "competitors".  So if you're setting up a new shop, you should choose Magento, right?  Well, not necessarily.  Since it's feature-rich, it's also complex and difficult to manage.  It also requires more of the hosting, and as many small businesses are on shared hosts, their accounts will not necessarily support Magento.  For the time being it is also slow, although this normally improves as a software matures.  It is also difficult to style with a custom-made themes and to do any custom integration because the whole codebase is complex.

What about Virtuemart?

One of the big attractions with Virtuemart is in its affiliation with the powerful Joomla CMS.  Virtuemart is mature, it works, and it is still a very good choice for someone who just wants a fairly simple webshop.  It is considered more user-friendly than alternatives like osCommerce and Zen-Cart.  If Virtuemart goes the same way as Joomla and modernises the whole code, it could well rival the best in the future.