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.