HikaShop vs. ZenCart Questions :)

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13 years 9 months ago #10570

Hi there,

I'm really interested in buying the Business version of HikaShop. Basically, I'm looking to create a very powerful shop in China with a company who is going to try to gain a presence there. Only, I have a few questions:

Recently, I started working with Joomla for the parent company, and I do love it. However, having just made a simple corporate site for the time being, I'm now faced with creating an online sales site for it's subsidiary. I'm wondering if Joomla/HikaShop is the way to go? (I have heard about many problems that people currently have with VirtueMart, btw)

Basically, if all I need is a shop, are there any advantages over having HikaShop instead of going with ZenCart? Since I'm familiar with Joomla, I am definitely leaning towards Hika, but I'm wondering if something like ZenCart offers advantages for a full shop over what Hika can do?

I also read that you don't have any Chinese translations yet, which may be a slight problem, but since we have many people working at the subsidiary in China, perhaps they can translate it and I could post that if they do.

Also, I played around with the currencies, but I don't see how exchange rates can be updated automatically, or is it done by hand?

Thanks for any questions and, rest assured, I am very impressed with Hika (free version) so far. :) I just wanted to ask some basic questions before I choose a system in the next few weeks for my boss.

Thanks again,

Nat.

EDIT: I forgot to add one more thing: Is it possible, in the future, to integrate orders from HikaShop into a real ERP system like MoveX? Has anyone done that yet? That's probably far out of most people's realm right now, but I'm definitely interested in any answers or direction somebody could lead me to. Thanks. :)

Last edit: 13 years 9 months ago by NatHarari.

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13 years 9 months ago #10592

Hi,

The biggest advantage of ZenCart over HikaShop is that ZenCart (as VirtueMart) has been out for a long time, so you can do a lot of stuff with it which might not be possible with HikaShop before some time. For example, a multi vendor feature is something that will take us quite some time to add to HikaShop.
On the other end, HikaShop was made for Joomla, so it is completely integrated with. That way, you don't need any bridge between zencart and joomla. The users are shared and we already have integrations with a lot of extensions for joomla. For example, if you want to add tabs in the description of your products, you can just use one of the tab content plugins for joomla which will also work for the products descriptions in HikaShop. It's just one example.

I saw some chinese (at least that looked like chinese) on that thread:
www.hikashop.com/support/forum/3-bug-rep...gs.html?lang=en#9867
So apparently that person started a chinese translation of HikaShop and you might want to contact him...
So far, he didn't share his translation with us. Otherwise, you can indeed translate it yourself via our interface in the tab languages of the configuration and we would be more than happy to publish it on our end.

For each currency, you can manually set a conversion rate from your main currency. In our commercial versions, we have a currency rates updater plugin which can connect automatically every day to the european central bank rates feed and retrieve the most used rates and update them on your website. The Yuan is also supported. You will also have an "udpate rates" button on the currencies listing to do it manually in one click: www.hikashop.com/support/documentation/i...ing.html#description

Concerning an ERP integration, we have some documentation for developers to create their own plugins for HikaShop: www.hikashop.com/en/support/documentatio...r-documentation.html
You should be able to do such plugin to integrate with MoveX if you know PHP and know MoveX' API. I didn't hear about any integration with that ERP so far.

Last edit: 13 years 9 months ago by nicolas.

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13 years 9 months ago #10593

Excellent and thank you for the response. :)

Question: What's a multi vendor? I'm not exactly sure I know how useful that would be yet.

The automatic plugin for currencies would really be a bonus, so I can tell you that I'm definitely interested in that. :)

As for the ERP, we have MoveX coders here who can figure that out if we need to. I can do the PHP with no problem.

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13 years 9 months ago #10597

Multi vendor is the possibility to allow your users to sell their own products on your website. You take a commission and they get the audience. It's a bit like ebay if you want.

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13 years 9 months ago #10600

Thanks! That may be something interesting to us in the future, but I don't really imagine it is at this time yet. So that's good. :)

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13 years 9 months ago #10751

I don't know if this information will be useful to you but I will say I have had a terrible time integrating stamps.com with zencart. it is due to stamps.com bugs but it may still be worth noting, fyi, depending on what shipper you would use. that said I haven't done any shipping integrations with hika so that is unknown to me.

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