Also Read: Some Common Magento Issues and Their Fixes
Earlier these two internet worlds were kept separate as content management system was not intended for tracking customer items, managing product inventory, allowing checkout through electronic payment and other functions related to an online store. However, things have changed now, developers have started creating robust e-commerce modules to work within the CMSs. Drupal is one of the best examples of such platforms, which attempts to amalgamate the niches of CMSs and shopping carts. It is an outstanding content management system, which is available free of cost and is undoubtedly the best choice for small businesses.
Know Your Drupal E-commerce Tools
Drupal CMS is notorious for offering plenty of modules that are designed to address numerous features. E-commerce in Drupal is not an exception & tools that you use certainly depend on the business requirements and timeline. The websites are likely to be built on Drupal 6 in the future with one of the following e-commerce systems:
Ubercart: It is a fully fledged e-commerce tool, which is ready to use. It provides advanced shopping cart features, ability to integrate with shipping & payment services and automate order workflow without any need to write code.
E-commerce: Its recent version is a neat and trimmed down API of e-commerce, which defines various components that are used to obtain the desired e-commerce functionality. The number of users and contributors is less as compared to Ubercart. Therefore, you must be comfortable in doing heavy lifting without needing help.
Benefits Of Choosing Drupal For Your E-commerce Website
- Easy editing and content generation by users
- Minimum risk associated with duplicate content
- Allows SEO-friendly URLs that give value to SEO e-commerce
- The e-commerce site can be optimized for popular search engines
- Allows users to include forums, blogs, comments, polls and books that lead to generation of quality content
- Drupal users can have access to statistics & logging and hence distinct users can work simultaneously
- You can modify the design to give your site a unique look and offer pleasing user experience
- A user can personalize, customize and configure product catalogue as per specific requirement
- Allows easy and convenient orders processing
- Enables integration of a secure payment gateway, which is certainly essential for all shopping portals
Tips For Better E-commerce With Drupal
Do Not Hack Your Drupal Modules: The developers coming from other e-commerce platforms to Drupal may be tempted to alter a few codes to instantly address issues, string changes or other business requirements. This usually results in edited modules that are not updated when bugs get fixed & module maintainers create new releases. It becomes a severe issue when these security fixes could not be applied to the live websites that handle payment information and customer contact. Several books are available on secure Drupal module development that include the best practices and methods to add and adjust features on Drupal site. You must take some time to learn the ways of managing the site in a way that you will be able to execute secure code.
Display Your Products In Style With Fully Customized Theme: Drupal themes/templates are not designed considering product sales and marketing. Mostly, Checkout forms and Add to Cart buttons receive less attention than Contact Forms and Login buttons. Theme layer of Drupal is really good and allows you to create customized templates to target specific elements of your site. So, you spend sufficient time in learning to create custom themes and give attention to the buttons that lead to revenue generation when clicked.
Conclusion
Hope these points are convincing & promising enough to compel you to opt for e-commerce web development using Drupal CMS.
Author Bio
Being a passionate Drupal developer at Sparx IT Solutions, Tom Hardy spends most of his time in learning new changes and modules that add to the Drupal technology. He loves to shares his ideas on Drupal development with the people through his informative blogs.
