Evolveo Distribuzione - Italy

I am involved in website development, using Joomla! mostly. The need of selling online is constantly growing and customers are usually asking for e-commerce development.
So, my business is sometimes connected to the mix of developing websites and developing e-commerce ideas, adding my e-commerce experience to their business inspiration...

2. How did you come up with this business idea? Which market research did you do in the beginning?

Not really needed a market research because the customer is a national (italian) distributor of EVOLVEO, a Czech Hi-Tech brand and he asked for a website looking very similar to the producer, with similar colors and navigation tree.
The website had to be well visible and able to sell to final customers as much as to reseller (since is the Country Distributor's website). So the platform had to manage different prices for different types of customers.

3. Why is your online shop a VirtueMart? What are your most essential VM-extensions?

Evaluating the main e-commerce platform, the choice has fallen on Virtuemart instead of a couple of "near" competitor because of its huge amount of addons completing the powerful core functionalities.
First of all my choice has been the Virtueplanet Smart template that brings with it many useful features like "Wishlist", "Compare list" and "Quickview", together with other VP extensions needed for a complete and correct shopper experience like VP OnePage Checkout and Privacy Policy for VirtueMart.
The correct management of shipping and payment rules is done by using VP Payment by Shipment (that handles compatibility between shipment and payment methods).
Furthermore the website uses:
Stockable Custom Fields of Breakdesigns to manage the stockable product variation (color);
Holest's Product excel-like manager for Virtuemart to ease some part of catalogue management;
PHPFactory's eBook Factory to publish a pdf catalogue of the products.