Any help with Joomla/Virtuemart websites

[Kris0101]

I have no previous web designing experience at all. But I went out on a limb and tried creating this website for my mother's jewelry businesss thru Joomla and Virtuemart. I've got the site up but with still quite a bit of work to do. I signed up with hostmonster after reading good reviews and seeing it supported Joomla. What I need help with right now is getting a shopping cart so we can except credit cards. Any suggestions? I don't know which ones will work with Virtuemart. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[pghcollectibles]

i have installed that but havent gone through it yet. search for a paypal addin or something like that. you would need paypal business account. you may need dedicated ip and ssl depending on what do

[Kris0101]

Thanks pghcollectibles. Still not quite sure though. Virtuemart comes with paypal as a payment method but thats it (just excepts paypal) from my understanding. I guess I can get the paypal shopping cart for credit cards. Surely since paypal is already added in it shouldn't be too hard to upload the cart right?? I don't know and won't know unless I try. I just don't want to purchase anything up front not knowing if it is supported by Joomla or if it will work. But thanks again for the help.

[shadmego]

In order to accept credit cards on your site "internally" you will need to have a merchant account with any card company you want to accept (mastercard, visa, discover, etc). You will also have to get a dedicated IP address (with Hostmonster) and a SSL certificate for your site (encryption). On top of all this, you will have to make VERY sure the processing takes place securely and all information stored on your site is NOT accessible to hackers (CC# and other personally identifiable information).

Payment gateways such as Google Checkout and PayPal among others handle all this for you. You simply set up your cart, let your buyers fill it with what they want to purchase, then when they checkout, they are sent to wherever (Google, Paypal, 2Checkout, etc) where they actually pay.

To use these payment gateways you will have to set up a merchant account with them and I believe 2CheckOut is the only one listed above that costs anything. Better verify this through some better research though. You will pay a small percentage fee for using these systems, but it is vastly cheaper than getting your own Visa merchant account.

After your buyers pay for their stuff, they are sent back to your site to a "Thank you" page you can set up within VirtueMart. I haven't played with VirtueMart in awhile, but I did set up a site a couple years ago with Joomla! and VirtueMart. It never really took off, but the structure is there (www.vipdropshipping.com (http://www.vipdropshipping.com))

~regards, and welcome to the community!