Drupal Commerce: The Perfect choice for your online store

Ecommerce has grown exponentially over the last twenty years and has become an integral part of our lives. Today, with the proliferation of Internet and mobile devices, consumers have multiple options to browse through before choosing a product. Hence, it is important to provide consumers with a user-friendly experience and easy payment methods.

India's e-commerce market, which was worth about $3.8 billion in 2009, touched a whopping $12.6 billion in 2013. According to Google India, there were 35 million online shoppers in India in 2014 Q1 and this is expected to cross the 100 million mark by the end of 2016. As per the reports by the Market research firm, eMarketer, by 2019, the global online purchases is expected to double its value to $3.551 trillion.

What makes Drupal Commerce stand apart?

With more and more people shopping online, retailers are looking for stable and robust platforms to build their e-commerce applications. Well, they’re quite lucky! Drupal commerce is simply what they are looking for.

Here are a few reasons why Drupal Commerce is different from the rest:

• Drupal Commerce is the only commerce platform that is built on an enterprise CMS. It connects content and products seamlessly to drive online sales and also influences offline sales through rich user experience, optimized merchandising tools, and proven SEO tools.
• Drupal Commerce is extensible, flexible, modular, and easily configurable. It can be configured easily to suit your business model. It is ideal for all types of physical and non-physical (digital) products that require unique payment models (i.e. recurring, licensing, subscription). It is the most flexible and yet lean ecommerce solution available.
• Drupal Commerce is completely free, community maintained, and open source. This does not mean inferior quality and no professional support; on the contrary, open source facilitates lower costs, higher quality, greater innovation, faster speed, and excellent security. Infact, the Drupal commerce project has a 71% response rate to the issues reported on their project page.

What does Drupal Commerce offer?

Commerce Cart: Implements the shopping cart system and add to cart features.The basic feature of every e-commerce service is a shopping cart. But is there something you could do to easily configure the view of your shopping cart? Yes, it’s called Views in Drupal! With views module, you can do just about anything with your shopping cart.

Commerce Order: Defines the Order entity and associated features. Order defines a set of statuses and states to inform you about the status of your order.

Commerce Price: Defines the Currency entity. This includes many features such as currency conversion, discounts and coupons, rules, sell price calculation and so on.

Commerce Product: Defines the Product entity and associated features. Put quite simply, an entity in Drupal is a way of representing data. With entities, you can define bundles and their fields. For example, if “shirts” are defined as a product, then it’s bundles (or in layman terms “types”) are “formals”, “informals” etc.

Commerce Store: Defines the Store entity and associated features. An entity provided to manage the store and store items.

Commerce Tax: Defines the Tax entities.

Drupal commerce mainly comprises two types of taxes; Sales Tax and Value Added Tax. Configuring simple tax is a very straightforward procedure in Drupal commerce. Just visit the tax rate configuration at Administration -> Store -> Configuration -> Taxes (admin/commerce/config/taxes) and add a tax rate. Although taxes are not that simple in today’s world, calculating taxes in Drupal is quite simple! Drupal commerce uses the rules module to add and calculate conditional taxes as well.

Choosing the right ecommerce platform for your business

It is often a difficult choice to decide which e-commerce platform to use. And to confuse you more there are a million articles on the internet comparing the different platforms out there. The best thing to do is to know your exact requirement! Do you know what you want and how it should be done? If the answer is NO, then you might end up with a tool with lot of out-of-the-box features; features that you probably don’t require! Here the downside is that these features are built on general assumptions and does not consider your specific requirements. While an ecommerce platform with lots of prepackaged features may seem good, the truth is that you may not be able to adapt as quickly as your competitors or you might have to modify those features, that will lead to incompatibilities down the road. The alternative to this is to use a platform where you get a smaller feature set with fewer assumptions and a better ability for customization. The tradeoff here is that you have more work to do to get off the ground—planning and implementing the exact features and experience you want—but with endless flexibility to mold a solution that exactly meets your current and future business requirements.

Drupal 8 and Drupal Commerce

Updating your store plays a crucial role because customers generally expect something new each and every time they visit an online store. Drupal 8 is all about increasing the level of engagement with the customers. By intuitively combining commerce with content, Drupal ensures an optimal web experience for users. Besides, Drupal has streamlined billing and shipping and made the order process easier and convenient. Furthermore, customers have yet another reason to cheer - improved shopping cart and checkout process that are customized to suit their expectations.

Drupal 8 has definitely struck bulls-eye considering the marvellous features that it has been adorned with. We at Zyxware have aligned ourselves to help our customers leverage the power of Drupal 8 in a quick and efficient manner. Drupal 8 is one of the best platforms to build your digital business. So, connect with us today to know more about our Drupal development services and how best you can use the power of Drupal 8 and Drupal Commerce.

References:

Why Drupal Commerce? 8 New Drupal 8 Features That Make You Want to Use Drupal Drupal 8: The new avatar is ready to propel the ecommerce momentum E-commerce in India