Technology
07 September 2015

10 Reasons Why We Love Drupal as an e-commerce Platform

3 minutes read

When building client sites that necessitate an e-commerce feature (a store or donations system for example), we use Drupal Commerce. We find it a very easy to use e-commerce portal that is fully integrated with all other aspects of the client's new website.

Annertech have built a large number of e-commerce stores using this system, some of which transact millions of Euro a year, such as for Oxfam Ireland, Trócaire, and Irish Cancer Society. This has enabled our clients to develop websites that, in essence, pay for themselves.

Here's our 10 benefits of the Drupal Commerce platform:

  • Free - Unlike the Magento and WordPress communities, the concept of "premium" plugins or modules that you have to pay for doesn't  exist in Drupal and so there are no hidden charges when you want to extend your Drupal Commerce shop with a new feature.
  • Extensible – Drupal Commerce is highly extensible, and can adapt to meet the changing needs of your website through integrations with third-party systems, feature enhancements, and international functionality.
  • Flexible - Drupal Commerce is especially good at selling physical products, complete with the ability to create variations of the same product, e.g. a single t-shirt product sold in multiple colours and sizes. However, it's just as easy to sell other types of products, such as digital content, recurring, tickets, subscriptions, etc. We are currently about to relaunch the Contemporary Music Centre website in Drupal which will use Drupal Commerce to sell music scores and other files.
  • Simple to manage - Manage orders, products, and customers through a consistent and intuitive interface that you can customize to fit your needs, workflows, and legacy systems.
  • Content driven – The Drupal Commerce platform is built upon the enterprise Drupal CMS, enabling it to connect content and products seamlessly to drive online sales and influence offline sales through a rich user experience, optimized merchandising tools, and proven SEO tools.
  • Supports multiple payment methods – Accept payment through multiple payment providers, including PayPal, Realex Payments, Stripe, SagePay and WorldPay. It's also possible for your customers to choose their preferred payment method from your predetermined list. This is something we've implemented on the Trócaire website which accepts payments via Realex Payments and PayPal.
  • Flexible shipping rules – Using Drupal Commerce you can define your own rules on how, which products and where to apply shipping charges, including flat rate shipping and weight based shipping.
  • Handle multiple currencies - A number of websites we built presently work in a dual currency manner, such as Oxfam Ireland and Trocaire.org. Both of these websites allow for transactions to happen in Euro (€) and Sterling (£). Adding additional currencies will be a matter of extending how this functionality works, though in the same manner as it presently does.
  • PCI Compliant - Drupal Commerce is fully PCI compliant and we make sure that no credit card details are ever stored on our clients' servers. So, should hackers wish to gain access to a client database, they will never gain access to credit card details that would allow them to defraud any of their customers.
  • Well documented - Drupal Commerce is very well documented on the Drupal Commerce website, making it very easy to imagine solutions for complex commerce functions.

We do our best to contribute as much code to Drupal as possible. Within the sphere of Drupal Commerce, we have contributed a number of modules to Drupal that extend/enhance Drupal Commerce, such as Stella Power's Commerce Donate module, Mark Conroy's Commerce Views module, and more. As well as this, we are the agency that Realex Payments has tasked with developing the module to allow Drupal to integrate with the Realex Payments gateway, supporting both Realex Redirect and Realex Remote, with or without 3D Secure.

So, if you want seamless integraton between your content and your commerce (and even your CRM), why not give us a call today on 01 524 0312 or drop us an email at hello@annertech.com and let's build a website that will pay for itself.
 

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