Not just a content management system, Drupal is also capable of powering a robust e-commerce site with the right modules and configuration. Whether you target digital downloads, subscriptions, or physical products, Drupal’s modularity, security, and scalability makes it a powerful candidate to support your online store.

In this article, we will identify some of the modules that will help you create an e-commerce solution on Drupal, and inform you how Empirical Edge’s Drupal development services can help you properly implementing these features.

The Core e-commerce Frameworks

Drupal Commerce

Being the most flexible, customizable, and full-fledged e-commerce solution on Drupal, Drupal Commerce allows its users to control product variation, SKUs, promotional pricing, and checkout flows. It can work in conjunction with Views and Rules, and can be set up in multisite or global setups.

Ubercart

Ubercart is best suited for small retailers, non-profits, or educational site forms. And, it boasts simplicity and reliability. Ubercart is a perfect choice if you need a simple shopping cart system, as a donation system, or for simply distributing online products.

Payment and Checkout Integrations

A smooth and secure checkout process is important for conversions. The integration modules consist of:

• Commerce Stripe and Commerce PayPal: Integrate seamlessly with two of the most popular payment processors.
• Commerce Braintree and Authorize.Net: Including subscription billing and additional fraud protection.
• Commerce Square: Combine payments for online and in-store sales—especially useful for a retail merchant.

These integrations will serve the purpose of usability and compliance, along with flexibility in payment options.

Shipping and Tax Setup

Having accurate shipping and tax calculations are important for global sales:

• Commerce Shipping: Provides real-time rate calculations from carriers like USPS, UPS and FedEx for both shipping and label printing.
• Commerce Tax: Automatically calculate VAT, GST and other regional taxes based on user location and product type.

By automating the process of shipping and tax processes, your store eliminates human error and makes compliance easy!

User Engagement and Marketing Enhancements

Consider the following enhancements to encourage users to engage and ultimately convert:

• Commerce Wishlist: lets customers save items to purchase at leisure.
• Commerce Recurring: creates subscription products that bill to predetermined billing cycles.
• Commerce Stock is a module for controlling stock across product variants.
• Commerce Coupons and Discount is a module that manages promotion logic as well as discounts and coupon codes.
• Customer Reviews and Ratings improve social proof and consumer confidence built into either the Drupal tools just mentioned, or specific modules.

These enhancements help to improve functionality and support your marketing goals. Commerce is all about creating a customized shopping experience.

Administrative and Performance Enhancement Tools

Operational and administrative efficiencies are vital for managing your store:

• Views is a built-in Drupal tool that generates product listings, order reports and customer dashboards.
• Search API with Solr or Elasticsearch can offer fast, faceted search options for larger catalogs.
• Commerce Migrate can help pull data from other platforms to your new store.
• Commerce Admin Views improve admin dashboards to make order and customer management clearer and more efficient.

All of the tools above will assist as your store continues to grow, and keep the back-end organized and operating smoothly.

How Can Empirical Edge Help With Your Drupal E-commerce Project?

At Empirical Edge, our Drupal team is an expert team of professionals who do e-commerce in the Drupal world. Here are some of the ways we can facilitate your e-commerce project:

• Installation/setting up of Drupal Commerce or Ubercart
• Connecting with major payment gateways and tax/shipping services
• Customizing basic functions to accommodate your unique business model or unique promotional features
• Enhancing user experience (UX) to encourage conversions (to drive sales) and brand loyalty (to get repeat customers)
• Hardening security and tuning performance
• Integrating to backend ERP, CRM, and marketing (email and content) systems
• Migrating existing content from outdated/competing platforms.

Final Thoughts

Drupal’s modular ecosystem with core and contributed modules builds flexible, extensible e-commerce stores that can serve all the markets (from start-ups to global conglomerates), and as long as you select the right set of core and contributed modules (along with the right combinations and functions of payment options, automation tools, and performance-optimizing modules), you can provide customers with a powerful platform that is easy for them to use.

If you are thinking about launching or upgrading to a Drupal-based e-commerce site, the expert team at Empirical Edge can provide you with the complete end-to-end service (including setup, hardening security, performance tuning to customizing existing commercial themes and integrating it, so you launch with confidence and scale efficiently.