What type of site is it? How many categories and products do you estimate and is there need for any type of special handling of pricing, like one site I did was for a printing company and there was a need to be able to take the user input length and height and figure a price based on the area. For these types of needs I would recommend Drupal. I am not a Joomla fan. You will find all of the plugins you need and more in Drupal for free. As a straight eCommerce site with the typical products etc I highly recommend OpenCart, it can go out of the box, as can a Drupal solution using the KickStart Distribution https://drupal.org/project/commerce_kickstart
I prefer Joomla. We work on Joomla websites for online stores like virtuemart shopping carts, searchable product catalogs, real-time transaction processing, web hosting, custom shipping tables, mail order systems and support for merchandising.
After a quick research we found Magento to be most popular ecommerce script. We're developing some extensions that will allow video live support, recording video presentations and reviews for products, broadcasting live store cameras.
I prefer joomla as it is actually very flexible and is built to handle excess pages which an ecommerce site is usually associated with .
I would definitely suggest Joomla as WordPress is used generally for blogging purpose whereas Joomla can be used for creating complex websites.
Joomla has less developers more than Wordpress, and I seen many e-shop site powered by Wordpress. It depends your budget.
I'd always suggest Joomla. It's more configurable and easier to manage. Just see the old eBay Site... It's been made with Joomla. And now the new Joomla3 Version supports mobile styles by default and that's very useful for your customers.
I will prefer to go with Wordpress, because at present I have been handling around 35 websites in my office which are running smoothly on WP, I face no problem, but yes, what I see a problematic part is the every now and then WP comes up with the new version, update part really attracts, but I have seen that for some reason if I am not updating my WP latest version then it tends to get hacked, so this is one thing which just needs to be taken care of. And if you have decent hosting(not just cheap shared servers) then hardly you will face any issue. But one thing which I see as a negative point in Wordpress, there is not enough platforms on web which are offering good themes like Blogspot free themes, can any one refer me any platform where from I can get premium Wordpress themes at free of cost, please help.
Recent Content Management System(CMS) usage statistics by builtwith.com, show thatWordPress the most popular Content Management System still reigns supreme from a survey last carried out on the 1st of February 2013. http://www.creativeloop.co.zw/2013/02/wordpress-still-ruling-the-cms-war-as-joomla-loses-ground/
Check possibilites both of cms, Artisteer can help you learn something more about them. Visit site bktemplates.com.
I think Opencart is better for e-commerce. WordPress have many plugin for e-commerce like woo commerce etc but it is only for less product and some payment options. I prefer Opencart that work with less product as well as for 1000+ product and in opencart there are many modules and so many shipping method available with various payment method.
We've used joomla for couple years and it was so hard working with themes and creating/editing new pages. The editor in joomla is terrible and we moved to Wordpress for our main website and Magento for the ecommerce tasks. It was the best idea for us.
I have 30 blogs, so automatically I use wordpress. But I use premium theme, so I bought online. But especial for ecommerceI use Joomla
Suggestion is Never Use Joomla or wp for eCommerce if your shop is heavy.Use Magento or opencart,zen cart instead.Joomla or wp are not feature rich eCommerce platform they are just for content management.
For small shop I suggest wordpress with woocommerce plugin. It is easy to use and you have many templates and other extensions (free or paid). If you want to have serious ecommerce than forget on Joomla, wordpress and other cms. It is better to look for Magento or Prestashop. For Magento you will need an optimization, otherwise it will be very slow. I suggest Magento for big shops.
VirtueMart is the old bird while speaking about e-commerce. Whether Woocommerce is pretty young in these sphere, and the most sufficient features is still developing. Also, both platforms with their plugins serve for various kind of e-commerce purposes . You may check up Woocommerce and VirtueMart comparison through the scale of their functionality.