Drupal Commerce

Submitted by Mike Otgaar on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 22:47

Drupal Commerce Revealed

Drupal Commerce, the e-commerce system for Drupal was developed from the well known and highly successful Ubercart system, combining many of the basic Ubercart functions into Drupal Commerce core features.

Drupal Commerce draws on the SEO friendly features of Drupal CMS, resulting in a highly optimised e-commerce solution. Drupal commerce provides a full feature online shopping site with normal website SEO potential.

Drupal Commerce Search Engine Optimisation

For search engine optimisation Drupal offers some very powerful features. With Drupal CMS so highly configurable, the e-commerce site builder can manage content in ways search engines will 'like'. Some of the major problems with other e-commerce systems are URL structure, duplicate content, and content value. With Drupal as the core website system, an e-commerce site can achieve the same standard of search engine optimisation as any other Drupal web site.

One possible drawback of Drupal commerce is the learning curve needed for newcomers e.g. the store owner.

A Full Feature Commerce Solution

Drupal Commerce provides a fully featured e-commerce platform with all the basic essentials to manage an online store.

Product Content Management

Content is king for search engine results. With Drupal commerce, product content management has all the benefits of Drupal to create optimised product content. Highly configurable product types, dynamic product displays and pricing rules give the store owner the power to show their customers exactly what they want, in the way they want to.

Customer Management

Drupal's powerful site management features when combined with Drupal Commerce, provide the site owner with tools to serve site visitors (potential customers) with information about products, product ratings, reviews, and FAQs, Drupal roles and permissions add a new level of control over visitor access to content and private areas of the site.

Order and Payment Processing

Flexible checkout systems, order status management, billing and shipping integration and Drupal Commerce's own dedicated payment API for payment processors with more than 20 payment gateways and more to come. If the payment gateway does not already exist, a drupal developer can build it for you.

Interface with Other Applications

Interface with nearly any type of client, web, mobile, and multiple types of systems, from Social Networks to B2B.

Product Search

Powerful product search with Drupal's search API, or leverage the power of Apache SOIR search, arguably the best server based web site search system available, to provide visitors with exactly the information they are looking for.

Additional Modules

As always with Drupal CMS, contributed e-commerce modules add to the core features of the system. including payment gateways interfaces, coupons and affiliates systems' For downloadable products e.g. software. paid file downloads are possible. Additional advanced shipping calculation and stock management bring total e-commerce store management to a singly interface - Drupal Admin

And of course all the other Drupal 7 modules can be used to build a website that is more than a store. With Drupal and Drupal Commerce the company website becomes a one stop place for customers to find information, order, buy and pay for products.

A Well Integrated System

Drupal Systems are typically well integrated. When a module or major subsystem is available for download, the development status is always clearly displayed for users. When you see a module version that does not have a qualifier at the end of the version name e.g. Beta or RC-1 etc, you know the module has been thoroughly tested and is suitable for a production website.

The development modules are also available for those brave enough to try them out and start building their site in preparation for stable version releases

Store Security

key on blue background icon An e-commerce website must be secure to protect not only the website itself, but the private information your customers need to provide, and financial transactions and information stored in the database. Drupal CMS is highly secure website operating system, and with additional server security procedures, your Drupal commerce store will be as secure as the state of technology allows

Relatively New but Now Stable

Drupal 7 is a fairly new system, Drupal Commerce is even newer. Until recently the core modules for Drupal commerce were still in early release (RC) format and some bugs still needed fixing. version 7.x-1.2 released on 25 Jan this year (2012) is now a full stable module suitable for production web sites.