Here at Tabs and Spaces, we use Drupal Commerce to stay ahead of the pack. With the eCommerce platform and CMS on equal footing, Drupal suits and adapts to meet the ever–changing marketing needs. We compiled a list of reasons we think Drupal is at the forefront.
The nuts and bolts
In terms of programming, Drupal commerce follows the same logic with Drupal 8, having everything available as entities like all the other structures of Drupal 8 such as content nodes, taxonomy terms and paragraphs. We have extensive experience in managing entities programmatically that can be easily adapted to the way of managing commerce related entities such as products, variations, product attributes, stores, orders, order items, shipping and payment methods and some more. The way payment methods, shipping and tax methods are built on Drupal commerce, provides an easy way for developers to implement their own custom rules in case the default options are not sufficient to fulfill the clients' requirements.
Availability of a wide range of modules and plugins
Drupal Commerce provides a huge variety of modules, plugins that extend the basic functionality of commerce.
Payment Methods
These include a variety of commerce payment gateways among the most popular payment methods in the world such as paypal, braintree, Stripe, Square and many more.
Shipping Methods
Drupal commerce also provides very nice ways of setting up shipping methods based on some widely common parameters such as product weight and/or dimensions.
Tax and Vat
The same applies for tax methods allowing website builders to set up vat rules based on types of products and countries.
Promotions
Drupal Commerce provides a very nice, easy and user friendly way of setting up promotions. Website owners can set up promotions via the administration panel.
Promotions can be set up based on:
different product types
different categories of products
different countries
Specific dates
Specific conditions such as when the order amount is bigger than a specific amount, then the offer will be applied.
Additionally, website owners have 2 main important options when setting up a promotion:
Setup the promotion to be applied automatically during the order checkout process when the conditions set up are satisfied. The website owners can manually enable or disable the promotion at any time.
Setup a number of coupons on the promotion. In this case the offer will be granted to users that enter a valid coupon code during the order checkout process. In this case, website owners do not need to worry about when they need to disable the offer or whether the website will give more offers than wanted, as when the coupon codes are all used, the offer will not be able to be applied for more users.
Active and Supportive Community
A very important advantage to consider, is that Drupal commerce has a big number of people that are actively:
Using Drupal commerce
Working on extending the functionality already provided
Working on providing more convenience to the end users on the checkout process
Great example is the user profiles re-usability during checkout which allows the user to store their shipping details to be re-used on next orders.
Another great example is the choice of copying the shipping information to billing information during checkout which simplifies the order process.
Working on fixing some minor bugs
Working on finding any vulnerabilities on the system and providing security updates
There are various ways that people can contact the community to provide information or ask questions about possible problems they may face during development.
Slack
Drupal Commerce has its own slack channel followed by more than 1500 users, sharing useful information about drupal commerce and providing solutions to problems that users may have.
drupal.org
This is the official drupal website which has thousands of followers.
It contains a great system of issues that can be posted by anyone, sharing a problem he/she may face and this will be viewed by the drupal followers and there is a high possibility that someone will provide a solution to the problem.
People can find patches that may solve a problem many people are facing.
Advanced Search Mechanism
Drupal commerce can have an advanced search mechanism for searching products through the website, thanks to the Drupal Search API. Drupal Search API is a drupal extension that provides an advanced way of indexing products. The term indexing refers to the ability of storing products in a way that fetching and presenting the products to the website is achieved much faster than the normal way. This is very important especially for commerce websites that may contain thousands of products.
Search API also provides the ability of having dynamic filtering on products listing pages, with the powerful search facets.
Facets are dynamic filters, meaning that filter options are provided for the users, only if those have results to show. If for example we have a filter of colours with options red, green and blue, if based on the current search there are no blue products, then the blue option will not be provided to the filter.
Facets also provide some other advanced features such as:
Different ways/widgets to be rendered with
Provide the number of results available per filter option
Integration with external client systems
As a result of the technical advantages provided by Drupal, developers have the ability to implement any kind of integration with third party systems (such as ERPs) with Drupal commerce.
Most of the clients have their customers, products, stock and orders stored on an ERP system. It is obvious that the ideal scenario for them is to have all of their items synchronized with their e-commerce website so they don’t need to manage 2 systems at the same time.
Drupal Commerce provides a very developer friendly way of setting up custom modules with any kind of functionality and without any limitations. This includes the setup of a full synchronization mechanism between the e-commerce website with an ERP system so the items, customers, stock positions and orders provided in the website are all up to date with the ERP system.
Further to commerce related modules and plugins, we have access to Drupal's views enabling us to present your products on the front–end of the site. There is hardly any flaw to be observed in a robust, flexible and dependable CMS platform like Drupal. Get in touch with us today and we will propel your concept to the forefront of your industry.
