Hikashop Mini Review

Hikashop is a shopping cart plugin for Joomla, as a website designer when looking for a shopping cart plug in for my websites the criteria was simple. It had to be easy to manage, have a good backend to let my clients manage their products, easy setup and configuration, support for Joomla 1.6, cost effective and easily customised to individual website needs. I was pleased to find Hikashop had me covered on all bases.

Configuration

Installation was straight forward with most of the default parameters sufficient to get things up and running in a flash. From there setting up the shop was intuitive with everything where you would expect it. I did come across a few little issues for example in regard to wording in the checkout process and notification emails. As we use GST in Australia the VAT reference had to be changed. A quick search on the Hikashop forums lead me to the languages file and i was off with a smile as was the case with most things that weren't immediately obvious.

Functionality

For a cart that is so easy to set up i found Hikashop to be quite fully featured. It comes with a number of payment gateway plugins pre installed, the PayPal plugin was ever so simple to configure and works flawlessly. Another great plugin in Hikashop i found was the Australia Post shipping calculator which will calculate postage costs automatically based on the products size, weight and dispatch and delivery area codes. Once a customer has registered and placed an order there is a nice customer control panel to allow editing of details, view order status and invoices etc.

At the backend the shop owner logs into the Joomla administrator web console and opens the Hikashop component which brings up a nice control centre to manage products, customers and orders. Invoices and picking slips can also be automatically generated by the system at the click of a button and automatic email notifications can be configured to be sent whenever an order status changes.

Conclusion

There are quite a few options for Joomla shopping carts along with some stand alone carts that have bridging plugins to integrate more closely to Joomla. Hikashop has proven to be a great choice for most small to medium sized implementations especially if you require Joomla 1.6 compatibility, business with very specific requirements or complex product ranges will probably want to look at some of the stand alone shopping cart systems. Hikashop is great value with the free Starter edition being suitable for small implementations looking to sell in their home country. The Business edition costs around $165AU giving you a range of additional features such as automatic currency updates, Acymailing integration, email support, Geo Location information of customers and orders and enhanced sales tracking to name a few. If you're looking for a shopping cart for small to medium implementations that just works id recommend you take a close look at Hikashop.

Welcome!

Welcome

Hi and welcome to the 10FX website design blog. We will be updating this page regularly with information about general website design and will also post interesting I.T. tidbits. As we specialise in Joomla website design many of the posts here will relate to Joomla extensions that we review. There are many great resources on Joomla extensions though it can be a difficult to find what your looking for unless you know what's available! So keep an eye on this blog for our latest reviews, this is also be a great place for customers to learn about the latest extensions that can be integrated into their website. 10FX is based in Gidgegannup servicing the Swan, Mundaring, Midland and Perth Hills area.

So to start off with lets answer the question what is Joomla and what is an extension?

Joomla is the leading open source website portal/ content management system, it allows website designers to create highly customised websites that can be customised to an almost infinite number of configurations. Being a content management system or CMS it allows every page or article to have an owner, this allows the website designer to give the business or website owner a username and password to easily edit content directly from the website it self. There is no need to call the web designer or use any special software to make a change for example if you want to add or remove a product or want to change a contact phone number on your website.

Extensions are modules that can be install into Joomla, these allow you to do a range of wonderful things. There are extensions to allow people to sign up to a news letter that the website will automatically distribute, media showcase extensions to show a slide show, song or video on your website, forum extensions and e-commerce extensions which allow you to have a full online store just to name a few.