VirtueMart is an Open Source eCommerce solution to be used together with a Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla!™ (but also works with Mambo). Joomla! and VirtueMart are written in PHP and made for easy use in a PHP / MySQL environment.

An Excellent product but with a couple of tweaks needed here and there when the rookie installs for the first time. So here is the solution to a bug that newbies may find frustrating!

The connection was refused when attempting to contact localhost:8888.

At a very basic level this is a 404 error.  The shop is trying to access http://localhost:8888/Joomla/quickstart/j157_topshop/index.php - fine and dandy if youare coding on a local server - however not so handy when you are in a liv or remote development environment.

So what needs to be done to fix it?

When installing Virtuemart there is one extra step in the process that needs to occur before your Joomla/Virtuemart shop is ready to be populated. Virtuemart stores the site url in a file called virtuemart.cfg.php - this site url does not update in some cases and so the VM config file needs to be edited. You can find this file in the administrator/component/com_virtuemart folder for your joomla installation. 

Open the file and scroll down to lines 35 and 36. Where you may see a reference to the localhost. Replace this text with the url of your site.

That is all there is to do.  The shop should now be working correctly :0)

 I hope this was of help to you.