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AceShop Review: First Look
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The basic function of an ecommerce application is pretty easy. Display products, store the products in categories, keep a track of items added to each customer's cart, collect the shipping information and process the payment. But doing this well is hard. Stores have different needs so ecommerce applications need a lot of flexibility. Also, if something is unclear on the frontend, a customer is less likely to buy, so it is critical to choose a solution that works well.
Until now, there have been several Joomla solutions to consider, each with their pros and cons. Probably the oldest and best known in the Joomla Community is Virtuemart. The big upside is that there are hundreds of extensions for it. But developers have complained for a long time that updates are slow and support/documentation is only fair.
When it came time to produce ecommerce tutorials for our Joomla Pro course, we whittled the list down to RedShop and Tienda. The RedShop backend was more confusing than Tienda, so we went with the latter. Sadly it looks like we backed the wrong horse. Tienda works reasonably well, but at time of writing, the only version is for Joomla 1.5. The JED listing contains a mix of fantstic and terrible reviews. The developers, Dioscouri Design has promised that a 2.5 version is on the way. However the time it has taken kills our confidence that the product will receive timely updates in the future and adequate support which is so vital with ecommerce. We're worried that it is heading down the same path as Virtuemart.
Some of our customers have reported they like HikaShop.
One of the best known open source ecommerce applications on the market is Magento. It is a stand-alone solution, but a "bridge" is available that allows it to run inside a Joomla site. This setup is somewhat more complicated and you effectively need to manage two sites. But MageBridge by Yireo is a viable solution for the more advanced developer.
And so we come to a new contender, AceShop. Well, technically it isn't new as it is a reincarnation of AyelShop, which is now part of the JoomAce family under a new name. AceShop takes OpenCart, a popular open source ecommerce solution and wraps it inside Joomla. This approach means that JoomAce hasn't had to develop an ecommerce application from scratch. They don't need to maintain one either, however this doesn't mean they're getting a free ride as there is still significant work to integrate it into Joomla.
Unlike MageBridge, AceShop is not a "bridge". Everything is managed natively inside the Joomla Administrator. However after installing, it is obvious that it is not a stand-alone solution. There are two levels of menus which is confusing at first. The top navigation options are shortcuts to the most commonly used functions such as Products and Orders. The second menu provides access to all other functions.
The frontend design is powered by OpenCart and the product page layout is excellent. All the features you would expect from modern ecommerce software are included such as product attributes, reviews/ratings, wish list, product comparisons, coupons, group-based pricing and multi-currency.
The next thing we looked at were our big three ecommerce killers - tax, payment and shipping. Payment is pretty straight-forward and the usual suspects are there; PayPal, 2Checkout, Worldpay and many more. But here's where the beauty of this arrangement becomes obvious. If your preferred payment option isn't available, you may well find it at OpenCart. Any OpenCart extension can be used with AceShop.
Tax was next and this can be a great source of grief, depending on your country. Here in Australia, our consumption tax is pretty simple. Just about everything has 10% tax applied and this is easy to configure. But for some, you might need to create two or even three levels of (local, state and federal). This functionality is available, although we didn't test this possibility.
The final big three is shipping. Get this wrong and you're guaranteed to lose business. Many options are available in AceShop including free, flat rate, per item, by weight and others. And once again, if you don't find what you need, check the OpenCart extensions.
There is one version of AceShop and it is sold by subscription. The cheapest option is $59 which includes 6 months of support and updates. A 12 month subscription is $99, 24 months is $149 or pay once for a lifetime subscription for $499. OpenCart extensions are a mix of free and commercial.
Would we buy it? This review is a "first look" meaning that we spent a couple of hours playing around. This is enough to get a good feel for its stability and functionality, but not enough to decide for sure if it is good enough to receive the Joomla ecommerce crown. There were a couple of sticking points. We installed an OpenCart shipping extension for Australia that refused to work. Then we tried the OpenCart version of a popular ecommerce extension called Magic Zoom. This has a unique installation routine that also refused to work. It did have a 34 step manual installation process, but when this was followed, it still didn't work. In fairness, this was most probably issues with the extension rather than AceShop. But I can't help wondering if the process would have worked directly into an OpenCart installation. Maybe I'll try that one day.
As mentioned above, we need to spend more time testing with a real shop, but I think this could be an excellent ecommerce solution for Joomla. I would also like to hear from more developers, but so far, the JED reviews are mostly positive. OpenCart is a strong ecommerce solution. JoomAce's other extensions such as AceSEF are well regarded and their support is excellent. The danger for JoomAce is they are relying on a third party to an extent and if the OpenCart project becomes stale, they can't do much about it.
When it comes time to consider ecommerce for Joomla, add AceShop to your shortlist.
What has been your experience with Joomla and ecommerce? Would you consider AceShop? Would you like us to produce tutorials for this or other Joomla ecommerce extensions? Please leave your comments below.
Comments
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Saturday, 28 April 2012I have recently tried AceShop and LOVE it overall. I have had some small issues with mods from Open Cart not being out-of-the-box compatible (JoomAce says all of them work that way, but that is not always the case). I have made use of JoomAce support on these issues and without exception they have resolved the issues. So far, I am happy with AceShop - it's the first Joomla e-commerce system I feel good about using.
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Saturday, 28 April 2012
We've been looking into eCommerce extensions for Joomla recently and found Virtuemart and Hikashop quite bloated, whereas simpler solutions such as Rok Quickcart are really only suitable for shops with a very small number of products. Ace Shop was on our list to test as the next extension, so it's great to see this review - we'll give it a try.
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Saturday, 28 April 2012
As a relatively new Joomla developer I was pretty nervous about upgrading one of my sites to add a shop. However I was pleasantly surprised with AceShop, I found it pretty easy to get my head round the system. When I did get an issue (regarding checkout with out payment) the developer was fast to respond and offered a great work round. Site still isn't live, but expecting great things from it. www.360-dental.co.uk
· Murray Cowell likes this comment. -
Saturday, 28 April 2012
A solid, reliable alternative to Virtuemart is certainly needed. I'd be very interested to see a series of reviews of alternative e-commerce extensions, and to hear about the experiences of people who have used them.
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Monday, 30 April 2012
My company is in the process of building our new ecommerce collution based on aceshop.
The issues we are experiencing are mostly related to OpenCart.
The most serious issue we are having is performance wise. One of our customers have a shop with some 2k-3k products, and every pageload takes 30sec+ -
Thursday, 3 May 2012
I am using AceShop on two websites at the moment, and it's working fairly well. One of the things I'm running into is that the affiliate function is pretty bare; we just switched over a website from Wordpress to Joomla, and the affiliates who were already signed up are complaining that this affiliate program does not track the traffic they bring to the website. I'm searching for an opencart affiliate plugin that is more feature-rich, and I'm hoping that I can integrate it seamlessly with the store we currently have. Would anyone like to point me in the right direction for such an extension?
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Thursday, 3 May 2012
As an OpenCart developer I highly suspect the issue with Magic Zoom not working was the fault of AceShop. In the past AceShop/AyelShop has advertised that it works with all third-party mods which is simply untrue. In my experience there is a very high failure rate.
· Steven Border likes this comment. -
Monday, 21 May 2012
We have a number of installs for clients with AceShop and it works beautifully.
There are some things a dev should know about OpenCart and Joomla at the same time, as well as some peculiarities in extensions that "may" cause issues with them being installed with AceShop - but really the professional extension developers are already supporting any differences with AceShop.
We have installed the (FREE and awesome) AusPost extension on two sites this week alone and it worked straight off.
Happy to help anyone wanting to use AceShop in Joomla - as it is so much amazingly better than VM and the other options, there's not much point at looking at the other ecommerce solutions anymore - makes us VERY happy little devs. -
Saturday, 26 May 2012
I'd love to see tutorials on AceShop. What we need is a shop that ANYONE can learn and run!
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Tuesday, 3 July 2012
Hi Marie,
When you subscribe to AceShop they have a heap of written AND video tutorials for you to watch.
There's also a heap of videos and written tutorials for OpenCart, which is "more or less" your interface and what you see when using AceShop.
It is one of the easiest e-com systems out there for the shop owner to use, plus a heap of videos and other support. Which, on top of being more stable than most out there, makes it very usable for REAL e-commerce projects.
Hope that helps, Max -
Wednesday, 27 June 2012
I have AceShop on a few sites and overall would recommend it. Quick to setup and lots of features. The negatives I have found are:
- OpenCart templates may have problems when you install. I had a client that bought a specific OpenCart template from ThemeForest and it was a nightmare to try to get work.
- Options/Attributes. If you have a site with many options with different prices and models, do a full run through of how you will set this up before getting to far. It can get very convoluted and my clients are VERY confused by it when trying to update their catalog.
- Pageload times. Not sure exactly what the issue is, but I am seeing it on all of my Aceshop installs. I think part might be the 8 or so JS libraries that it loads. I can get a 90+ score on pagespeed from Google and Pingdom, but still have load times > 8 seconds. If anyone has found a way to improve this, I would really appreciate any hints. -
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
I need an alternative to Vm. I read bad things about 2.0 version. I will check aceshop.
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Wednesday, 17 October 2012
Like what mario said i will check ace shop my self im having some trouble.
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Wednesday, 31 October 2012
Hello Richard!
The only thing I wish for Christmas:
That you make a tutorial about RedShop. -
Thursday, 1 November 2012
I'll keep that in mind. When I first looked at it I thought it was too confusing for beginners, which is most of our audience. They wrote to me asking me to take another look. So I may well do that.
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Friday, 18 January 2013
Thanks for this. We've made dozens of Virtuemart sites but VM2 is confusing and buggy.
We need to swap and it's looking like Aceshop may be the way to go.
Question: Does Aceshop handle stock on a per attribute basis e.g. 2 red T-shirts in stock, 3 blue T-shirts in stock etc. The colours being selected in a drop down on a single product.
That's one of the very big holes in VM functionaility. -
Saturday, 19 January 2013AceShop does feature Product Attribute Groups, but not sure if they manage stock based on those attributes. You might want to shoot them an email to find out.
Also, add MijoShop to your list of candidates. It's gaining in popularity quite rapidly.
Good luck.
I would consider Ace shop based on the other offerings from the company. I use a few of their packages and absolutely love them. It may be early since this is the first release but I trust the company.