7 E-Commerce Modules that Every Drupal Website Must Have

For the very first time ever in the year 2012, the e-commerce sales globally topped 1 T US dollars. As per the industry estimates, the projected sales would be 4 T by 2020. With more and more enterprises conducting core businesses online, Drupal is no longer the pure CMS only but has become an e-commerce full-fledged site builder. This might not be the part of core Drupal; contributed modules provide it the necessary support.

When you search Drupal.org for actively developed, stable e-commerce modules, you would get 330 hits. Most of these modules are optional in the online storefront. You might not find Amazon Store, AdSense or Affiliate Store interesting unless you need to monetize the website with affiliate marketing or advertisements. Modules like Barcode are relevant only when you desire specific functionality with your storefront.

Here below is the description of 7 e-commerce best-of-breed Drupal modules together implementing online storefront core functionalities. Such modules focus upon mission-critical enterprise operations to drive the business results with the direct impact upon its bottom line.

7 E-Commerce Modules that Every Drupal Website Must Have

Every eCommerce shop using Drupal would benefit immensely with these essential e-commerce modules. Now let’s discuss each of the modules in particular and see why it is so great.

Drupal Commerce vs Ubercart

E-commerce is never a core built-in Drupal feature and the easiest method of adding e-commerce functionality to sites is through the installation of one of the 2 Drupal competing modules. Ubercart and Drupal Commerce are the e-commerce frameworks or ecosystems depending upon third-party modules making them feature-complete.

Both are excellent frameworks for e-commerce with the active community of developers for each. It is easy to configure Ubercart and it is ready for deployment out-of-the-box. Drupal Commerce, in contrast, is customizable and you can scale this up for supporting e-commerce large enterprise operations.

When you operate small businesses having modest requirements of e-commerce with limited IT budget you would do well with Ubercart. Medium or large enterprises use Drupal Commerce due to its flexibility and it is adequately scalable to support business growth in future. Besides, it satisfies the complex requirements but you have to possess the technical expertise with considerable resources and time to use Drupal Commerce and get the results you seek.

Commerce Recommender / Ubercart Recommender:

Optimize the growth of revenue in e-commerce by boosting the per order revenue. Upselling and cross-selling are the two key techniques for achieving the objectives of revenue growth. Ubercart Recommender and Commerce Recommender are two Drupal modules to install for enabling cross-selling on Ubercart and Drupal Commerce platforms respectively.

Both these modules make the personalized recommendations related to web users. Recommendations depend on the current order of the users along with their previous purchase.

When the user is the new customer there would be limited recommendations due to the absence of any purchase history. Here cross-selling modules would analyze other user purchase history that bought same product previously. The product recommendations would be what the other users ordered in their prior purchases.

Commerce Upsell / UC Upsell:

The upselling process is different from the cross-selling process because the former works by enticing customers making them upgrade o expensive products having better margins of profit. Cross-selling involves the purchase of an additional product like the accessories related to the main purchase item. When you want to upsell, try using UC Upsell and Commerce Upsell as respective modules for installing on Ubercart and Drupal Commerce platforms.

Both these modules facilitate defining of the related products by site builders to upsell successfully. During the customer checkout process, the software would recommend the upgrades for products based upon products present in a shopping cart.

Invoice:

This Drupal module generates the sales invoices related to online business. It is possible to customize the content and the format of invoices with appropriate template files. Once you instantiate the sales invoices, it is possible to view these online with output in HTML and PDF format.

Commerce Shipping:

Online customers have the flexibility to order from the country of their choice across the globe. Prior to the actual purchase of the product, they require information regarding shipping and the related costs. The calculator for shipping rates is Commerce Shipping. This works as a platform for shipping calculation dependent upon carrier-specific third-party modules for providing actual rates of shipping. It supports FedEx, USPS, and UPS for example through modules Commerce FedEx, Commerce USPS, and Commerce UPS respectively. By using the appropriate rules, it is possible for the site administrators to configure the availability of the shipping services on web stores along with the related charges and the flat rates of shipping.

Mailjet / MailChimp E-Commerce:

Social media has grown phenomenally in the recent years but email marketing is still the online marketing integral strategy. Sales and marketing campaigns use the strategy of sending emails to the people on subscription lists on a regular basis. Mailjet module provides support to Drupal Commerce email marketing. MailChimp E-commerce provides support to both Ubercart and Drupal Commerce. A great e-commerce practice is offloading the email sending a part to cloud-based email third party service providers. MailChimp and Mailjet E-Commerce integrate with the related service providers. To use these modules, you need to sign with respective companies. It is possible to avail free services when you keep email volume under the threshold levels. The site administrators can use these modules to personalize marketing messages, track the effectiveness of campaigns, and create the email campaigns.

Currency:

With e-commerce, you can attract people located across the globe and do business in local currencies. For this, the online stores should be capable of converting the product prices right from preferred currency of the enterprises to each customer local currency. Besides that, the local amount presentation after the new conversion should be in a format conforming to the regional conventions of the customer.

Currency is Drupal module that converts the world currencies based upon the exchange, stored rates. This module customizes price information, display format automatically based on the locality of the online shoppers individually.

Conclusion

You can unlock the revenue generation capabilities of Drupal sites for enterprises with e-commerce. It provides a superior e-commerce module with Ubercart and Drupal Commerce, the 2 major technology ecosystems.

Integration of appropriate module becomes critical in providing the required e-commerce functionalities. The site builders also have to pay attention to other critical factors like site security and SEO. SEO brings potential customers and more visitors to sites with the site security offering protection against hackers upon the transaction of online business.

Secure and SEO friendly e-commerce site building requires an expertise beyond most enterprise capabilities so you might require professional Drupal solutions, please contact KrishaWeb.