WHY CHOOSE DRUPAL COMMERCE FOR YOUR BUSINESS? ......................................................................................................... 2 2.
MAJOR COMPONENTS OF DRUPAL COMMERCE .......................................................................................................................... 5 5.
THINGS TO REMEMBER FOR YOUR DCOMMERCE PROJECT ....................................................................................................... 13 6.
REFERENCES AND CREDITS: ........................................................................................................................................................ 13 7.
With e-commerce booming around the world, millions of players have entered the market worldwide to develop and offer different e-commerce logistics models for different products. The recent years have witnessed a dramatic shift in e-commerce business, evolving much beyond the shopping carts and streamlined checkouts. Although e-commerce has become a critical line of emerging business, many companies who have already implemented this solution are reluctant to invest heavily in adding new capabilities to their existing systems. As a result, open source solutions began to gain attraction where retailers need not manage their own infrastructure. With myriads of content management systems and platforms for an e-commerce website, it becomes difficult to choose the right option for your online store. Among many successful candidates, Drupal is one of the most flexible and powerful platform, especially for larger websites that expect a huge amount of traffic. This white paper offers an insight into the Drupal commerce platform and how it has emerged as a revolutionized software integrating content, commerce and community for engaging Web experiences that bring more traffic to drive better results.
A successful e-commerce business is not just about selling products, but it also involves managing your data and client interactions effectively across a wide range of platforms. So, it is important for your website to have both content and commerce. Drupal commerce is a simple yet powerful tool for online retailers, which provides a flexibility to integrate a rich commerce experience anywhere in their environment. The following are the most differentiating advantages of this open source solution, impacting the decision of retailers over other CMS platforms:
Content-Driven: Unlike OpenCart, Magento, Konakart and several other off shelf solutions, which focus merely on product management, Drupal commerce is best for both the product as well as content management. It helps in connecting the products and digital content like videos, blogs and editorial content to provide you a seamless experience of online sales and also influence your offline sales through optimized merchandising and proven SEO tools.
Open Source: This platform has an edge over others by being open-source solution as this feature facilitates lower cost, greater innovation, faster speed and higher quality.
Flexible: As the business requirements frequently change with time, Drupal commerce offers a more flexible and modular approach, which can easily fit with the changes in requirements.
Adaptable: With the increasing dependency of customers on smartphones for online transactions and shopping, Drupal commerce provides Commerce Mobile which is a native cross-platform mobile application of Drupal Commerce for optimizing the contents of any website that suits varied phones and tablets.
Integration: Using Drupal commerce, you can easily integrate your site to all social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. This increases your market reach to a large extent by helping your customers promote and share their choice of products across networks.
Drupal commerce is a powerful framework which is built on Drupal API, core and contrib. It implements various commerce related API’s like products, checkouts, payments, etc., extending the existing powerful Drupal 7 API. Drupal commerce was written from scratch by developers with extensive e-commerce experience who used the new APIs of Drupal 7, resulting in much greater compatibility with contrib modules. As a result, less custom code (both themes and modules) is required while developing a new website. The Drupal commerce framework is depicted below:
The following architectural principles are employed in Drupal commerce:
Build APIs and reuse from applications
Isolate user interface from the applications
Develop interface with various contrib modules like views, rules that follow principles, etc.
With Drupal 7, the concept of entities which are field-able objects serving specific purposes, but sharing common base level functionality, was introduced to the open source platform. Some existing entities of Drupal 7 are users, nodes, taxonomy terms and comments. In addition to this, Drupal commerce came up with several new entities for your website orders, products, customer profile, etc., which are depicted below:
o Product: Product represents anything that you are trying to sell and has a title and a price associated with it.
o Order: The process of ordering starts as soon as the customer starts placing the product in his/her cart. They are basically a container holding all the information related to your current shopping experience.
o Line Item: Line items exhibit an instance of a product, which is currently in your order.
o Payment Transaction: It holds all the financial metadata (amount paid, timestamp and payload information)
for every checkout attempt with the added line items in the cart.
o Tax: Drupal commerce gives the flexibility to configure tax in the following three ways:
Sales Tax: This tax style is often used in the States, where governmental entities may impose their own tax on every purchase. It is usually added as a line item in the subtotal.
VAT: In VAT, the total amount displayed to the customer already includes the tax with no amount added in the subtotal section (although Drupal Commerce does itemize the tax portion of the total).
Simple Tax: For adding a simple tax, you can refer to tax rate configuration at Administration -> Store -> Configuration -> Taxes (admin/commerce/config/taxes) and correspondingly, add a tax rate.
o Checkout process: A checkout process follows certain integrated rules, which can either be used to calculate tax or discount on a given order. A specific module is in place for the checkout process:
A clear understanding of business components plays a crucial role in the correct implementation of modules for meeting the requirements. Following are the major components involved:
1. Product catalog management
2. Order management, line item
3. Payment gateway
4. Tax calculation / Vat support
5. Pricing rules
6. Flexibility with views, rules, Entity API, CCK
7. Third party integration
8. Open source
9. Social media integration
10. Responsive design
11. Multilingual support
12. Stock Rules
1. Product Catalog Management: Drupal Commerce provides approximately 20 management screens, of which
major ones are depicted below:
Store screen - Store screen helps you in managing available items in your store.
The display of each element and attribute can be managed by the below screen:
Product Listing - These screens help you list the products available in your store. Drupal commerce provides a facility to perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations on your products.
Product Types - Product Types screens facilitates you to list different types of product in your stores.
2. Order management and Line item - Order management differs from line item in the sense order management is actually your shopping cart which contains the different products on that order which is referred as line item. The following screens display the order and line management in Drupal Commerce:
Product Overview: Drupal commerce provides the facility to review each product from different angles, by
zooming in and out.
3. Payment gateway: Payment gateway is one of the major components which Dcommerce supports. The different gateways available for Drupal commerce can be seen at the following free extension listing: https://drupalcommerce.org/extensions/module/payment You can also add your own payment gateway through API example module which comes with Dcommerce. Drupal commerce provides following four walking steps for completing every purchase process:
4. Tax calculation / VAT Support: As mentioned earlier, tax configuration is very much possible in Drupal commerce and can be configured either as sales tax, VAT or a simple tax.
5. Pricing Rules (Discounts/Rewards): This feature attracts your customers towards the product and hence, accelerate the buying decision.
It also provides the facility to import discounts on your site with the same identifiers:
6. Flexibility with views, rules, CCK
Drupal commerce is very flexible with the rules, views and Entity API, CCK as it allows all CRUD operations on these modules. Some of the major views which come inbuilt with a Drupal commerce distribution profile are as follows: 1. Shopping cart summary: Cart line item summary displayed during checkout.
2. Shopping cart form: Display a shopping cart update form.
3. Shopping cart block: Display a list of line items added to cart.
4. Product revisions: Display a list of product revisions for the store admin
5. Order revisions: Display a list of order revisions for the store admin.
6. Order payments: Display and total an order's payment transaction history.
7. Line items: Display a set of line items in a table.
8. Display Products: Display all the products that are available, using Search API
9. Discounts: Display a list of discounts for store admin.
10. Customer profiles: A list of customer profiles of all types.
Other rules are available for reference in the demo site [http://dev-faichi-dcommerce-demo.gotpantheon.com/#overlay=admin/config/workflow/rules]
7. Responsive Design (Theming/Appearance layer) Drupal commerce comes with Omega Kickstart which is based on HTML5, Responsive design. Every theming preprocessor/layouts etc. which Core Drupal supports can be used.
8. Third Party Integration: Any component of Drupal commerce can be easily extended through free third-party modules or extensions. The list are: https://drupalcommerce.org/extensions
9. Open source: Drupal commerce can be easily downloaded from https://www.drupal.org/project/commerce for building your e-commerce site.
10. Social Media Integration: As discussed earlier, it even allows you to configure various social media icons such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. in your site. 11. Multilingual Support: Drupal commerce is extremely supportive with multilingual as Drupal 7 is. Some useful links for understanding multilingual are: http://hojtsy.hu/multilingual-drupal7
http://randyfay.com/node/88 12. Stock Rules: Stock rules play a major role with products having limited edition. Once the number of items in stock for a particular product is given, then a countdown will start on every purchase of that product. As the count reaches zero, that product will be displayed as “Out of stock.
THINGS TO REMEMBER FOR YOUR DCOMMERCE PROJECT 6.
While developing a Drupal commerce project, the following points should be kept in mind:
Less coding, and more clubbing: Although Drupal commerce comes with an initial e-commerce site feature in itself, you need to carefully club them according to the required business flow.
Theming Layer: Developer can choose either to create the theme from scratch or use the responsive theme of Dcommerce itself.
Development Flexibility: Drupal commerce offers a lot of flexibility to the developers in terms of pre-existing modules which are easily configurable.
Major areas where estimation can go high: Any functionality which is out of the box can definitely increase the project estimate.
Faichi Team has developed a Demo site for ecommerce portals to exhibit different possibilities and functionalities of Drupal commerce. Please refer: http://dev-faichi-dcommerce-demo.gotpantheon.com
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Faichi Solutions specializes in building end to end solutions for Enterprise portals using Drupal CMS. If you have a similar project in mind for Drupal Development, QA or Support. Please get in touch with us at [email protected] or call us on +1 (408) 769-4941. To know more about our services, please visit www.faichi.com
USA India Faichi Solutions, Inc Faichi Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Office No. 230 504, Accord IT Park, Baner Road 640 West California Avenue Pune, Maharashtra – 411045 Sunnyvale, CA 94086
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