Drupal, one of the most flexible and powerful CMSs available, shines with e-commerce websites. It’s highly extensible, and can adapt to meet the changing needs of your site through integrations with third-party systems, feature enhancements, and a variety of modules. So if you’re looking for a CMS to build feature-rich online shops that do more than just take orders, Drupal is it.
Now, to take full advantage of the power and functionality of Drupal for your e-commerce site, here are some essential modules we recommend installing. These modules allow you to manage orders, products, and customers, add multiple payment methods, currencies and shipping charges, all of which are essential for a successful e-commerce website.
The Drupal Ubercart module is the most popular e-commerce solution for small to large businesses looking to sell products from shippable goods to downloadable goods. It’s simple to install and set up, allowing you to get your shop functioning quickly and with little hassle.
It’s a fairly basic shopping cart system that allows you create an online store and manage products and orders, organise products automatically and track stock with a click of a mouse. A big plus is that it features one-page checkout functionality, which makes purchasing fast and easy.
The downside however is the lack of documentation. Although it’s fairly easy to set up and administer, it would be nice to have some documentation to help with the creation and configuration an of Ubercart e-commerce platform.
This module actually includes a set of small modules that extend Drupal’s e-commerce functionality. It takes care of all prevailing e-commerce aspects, making it easy to manage products, customers, orders and payment processing. It’s particularly good at selling physical products, complete with the ability to create variations of the same product. It also allows you to add multiple payment methods, plus it’s PCI compliant so no credit card details are ever stored on your servers.
Unlike Ubercart, Drupal Commerce is excellent for bigger-sized Drupal stores. Social media integration, more design freedom, mobile responsiveness and international currencies are just a few of the platform’s enhanced capabilities that could provide value to a larger retailer.
Essential for those wanting to sell through Amazon, this module makes it possible by implementing Amazon Associate web service. Amazon Store makes it really easy to set up your shop and get access to intuitive tools for your product pages and shopping cart. Plus, you get to receive commissions based on purchases made through your store.
As the name implies, this nice little module allows you to generate invoices that customers can then pay using a payment method supported by Drupal, like credit card, PayPal and more. You also have the option to email the invoices to your customers and you can customise them to match your brand.
Commerce Customizable Products
A neat module that allows you sell custom products that require customer input when added to the cart. For example, it’s useful for when you are selling personalised items where the customer needs to add a message, like on t-shirts or jewellery.
This module was created for Ubercart and it allows users to create and manage wishlists of products found in your shop. What’s nice about it is that other customers can search for a particular list and purchase items from it on behalf of the person who created the wishlist.
This module helps you to persuade customers to buy additional or more expensive products from your shop. It works very simple. UC Upsell lets you create a list of items based on users’ choice, thus increasing the chances of growing your sales.
If you want to earn some extra cash and display ads from Google AdSense on your site, this module can help. With the Adsense module, you can set up, configure, and administer Adsense advertising, as well as track your revenue and site traffic in detail.
If you’re selling product internationally, you need to be able to show prices in various currencies. With this module, you can post currency conversion and information on your site so visitors can see current exchange rates.
Like most e-commerce site owners, you probably want to bring in as many potential customers to your shop as you can. You want to show up at the top of the search results for relevant keywords. This module can help with your SEO by setting up a checklist of tasks to tick off when optimising your site. It also helps with keyword research and link building.
These are some of the most popular and useful Drupal modules for e-commerce sites. Which one(s) do use? Any other you’d recommend?
Comments
Please remember that all comments are moderated and any links you paste in your comment will remain as plain text. If your comment looks like spam it will be deleted. We're looking forward to answering your questions and hearing your comments and opinions!