Chapter 11. Building an Online Store
An online store using Joomla is a great way to get your products out into the world and make money. Stores can offer physical products or virtual products available for download only. Payments can be taken via credit card with a payment gateway, or hosted solutions like PayPal or Google Checkout can be used. Benefits to using PayPal or Google Checkout are that you don’t have to be concerned with store security, as you’ll see later on in this chapter.
Stores are almost always more complex to configure than you realize going into it. While YouTube may have a video showing you how to set up a store in a few hours, it rarely is as simple as that. Planning is required to set up your store. Thinking ahead is also required. We do not yet know what will be necessary when going from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4. We might need to migrate third-party extensions. If you know you don’t want to take on migrating your store in the future, you may want to think about utilizing a hosted shopping cart like Shopify, AmeriCommerce, or MagentoGo. When you choose a hosted solution, typically security issues such as those discussed in Notes About Security, SSL, and PCI Compliance are taken care of for you.
If your website is selling products (or subscriptions), you will need to budget for expenses. Online stores like Amazon or eBay have IT staff/programmers employed to run, manage, and administer their online stores. Even “simple” products can require the ongoing expense of ...
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