I've been a Redshop user for now almost 2 years now.  I was a huge advocate of the solution (it's prominently featured in my Joomla & Beyond 2012 talk) and I've been very vocal on Twitter and in other places that I believe RedShop is the best ecommerce solution available on Joomla.  

I've been part of the RedShop beta group, I've spent numerous hours tracking bugs with their developers. I've used the RedHost services for a long time as well as paid for several custom integration/dev work from the RedComponent devs. Ronni has personally helped me on numerous occasions sometimes in the wee hours of the night and I will be always grateful to him for his help and dedication.

On the other hand, I have many times suggested things that I felt either fell on deaf ears or were not even responded too.  I initially wrote this 'report' at the request of some members of the RedShop team but I decided to make this more of a public thing for 2 reasons: 1. to get feedback from other people - because I believe that many of these issues are universal. 2- make sure that this document was not "lost in the shuffle".  

I've said that RedShop is the best shopping cart solution available on Joomla... but as many around me know, that is not as much of a compliment as it sounds!  I believe that Joomla shopping carts are not as competitive as many other solutions out there and I, unfortunately, do not see that changing in the near future...

The short version:

Joomla shopping carts, please STOP sending pending order emails to customers BEFORE they had a chance to actually complete their transactions with Paypal (yes, I kind of expected this from VirtueMart but from you redShop? Really?)

The long version:

Recently, one of the very usefull features of sh404sef, automatic short URLs, started supporting K2 content... Here's how to enable it.

Did you ever move a K2 based site from one host to the other (or from a local copy to your production server) and started getting blank pages with Fatal Error [function.require] style errors? Don't worry, it's a 10 second fix...

Used to be that you had to wait at least 24 hours for any results to start showing up in Google Analytics.  In fact, most help files and documentation still say that you have to wait 24h until you see anything... Not anymore, it's not instant but you can now select the current day in the date selector and you'll get results just a few hours later! It makes testing SO much easier...

Based on all the postings over on the community forum, most people starting with K2 have the same bunch of questions... 

One of the features that K2 chose not to bring over from Joomla articles is the concept of "Show Unauthorised Links".  In Joomla, this simple checkbox allows you to display to all your visitors the link and intro of articles that have an access-level of "Registered".  Once users click on the link, then they get prompted to login to view the full article.  That is a pretty common workflow for sites that use a paywall or register wall... So how do we accomplish this in K2?

Has this ever happened to you: you are editing the local version of your live site, make some changes, answer some emails, tweet, then you do some more changes and suddenly you realize you were editing the live version instead of the local version? Maybe it's just me but here's some things I do to make sure I don't get fooled!