Acknowledged as one of the most popular online activities, online shopping is considered one of the key contributors in taking up global e-commerce sales to 3.53 trillion US dollars in 2019, with e-retail revenues' projected growth of approximately 6.54 trillion US dollars in 2022.
Desktop PCs are still the most popular devices among users for placing orders; however, mobile devices, especially smartphones are getting up to speed to deliver seamless digital experiences.
Drupal has modernized itself from being just a pure WCMS to a full-grown e-commerce site builder
As more enterprises have taken their core businesses on the internet, Drupal has adapted itself well enough from being a pure website content management system to a full-grown e-commerce site builder.
Though e-commerce is not yet a part of Drupal’s core, it extends its support in the form of contributed modules. The e-commerce community in Drupal stays active by introducing revolutionary features to help build simple, powerful, and intuitive sites.
This blog illustrates those e-commerce modules which smoothens enterprise mission-critical operations that drive business results and have a direct impact on the bottom line.
But Why Drupal?
In case you have already ventured into e-commerce or are planning to, you should never underplay the essential role of the technology as it takes on a critical role in helping you reach millions of customers digitally and make your company rise and shine into a vibrant & flourishing business.
Considering that fact, Drupal can prove lucrative in creating a stable online store with its ability to provide an attractive and clean design, leading to engaging user experience and increased conversions and revenue.
Read on to find out why you should capitalize on Drupal only to make it big in your e-commerce venture-
- Implicit SEO Tools
It helps you out in taking your Drupal-powered website on the top ranks of the search engine results
A lot of e-commerce websites become lost in the shuffle and fail to garner the attention of people from various sections of society. However, with Drupal, you require minimum support of SEO experts as it already comprises of SEO Checklist module, built-in URL optimization, advanced.htaccess, and other analogous useful tools. Thereby, it helps you out in taking your Drupal-powered website on the top ranks of the search engine results.
- It Is Powerful and Multi-skilled WCMS
Today, making customers place their orders is not the ultimate goal of e-commerce sites. Rather it is to engage them through blogs, forums, community, articles, and reviews around products to attract the new ones and at the same time, keep the existing ones loyal towards the brand.
These features can be easily integrated and administered to your e-commerce site with a groundbreaking system like Drupal.
- Seamless Integration With Third-party Solutions
Drupal allows effortless and seamless integration with third-party solutions, like Acquia Lift for enabling personalization on your site to deliver customized results to users, or Smart Content module for Account-Based Marketing. All this can be done through the RESTful API. Or you can also employ the Feeds module, which lets you import content from external data sources.
- Fast Deployment
Drupal ensures that you get many capabilities and functionalities fresh-out-of-the-box without paying exorbitantly
The type of framework you handpick for designing your e-commerce site also relies on the speed of the deployment of the end solution.
Drupal, with more than 40K modules, ensures that you get many capabilities and functionalities fresh-out-of-the-box without paying exorbitantly. Simply put, Drupal provides all the tools utilized by the most renowned marketplaces of the world successfully for a long time.
- It Is Secure
There are more than 45,000 developers lending their support to the community & making every effort possible to combat all security risks that may occur, ensuring that the information in your store, as well as your client’s data, is out of reach of intruders and malicious attacks.
- Seamless Mobile Experience
Drupal-based pages are already created with responsive web design guidelines in mind and are adapted to modern smartphones, thereby; saving you from creating separate mobile-specific websites. Further, it can deliver content directly to mobile apps.
Drupal Modules To Help You Get Your E-commerce Site Going
The most suitable modules that can help you build your out-of-the-box e-commerce site swiftly are listed below-
Drupal Commerce module makes a great fit for small and large businesses alike as it is highly flexible, scalable, and customizable. Users can create several types of displays and product categories with this module and simultaneously manage the payment procedure and orders efficiently.
Get your Drupal site up and coming with Commerce Kickstart in an accelerated way with its built-in configurations and modules, making the whole procedure of launching an online store quick and easy.
Those running their site on Drupal 7, two versions of the module are available: both 1.x and 2.x. For those running their site on Drupal 8, you’ll need the Drupal Commerce 2.x installer.
It provides you the flexibility to tailor more complex shipping scenarios while your business grows at every stage
Chances are high that if you are selling products online, you are shipping them too.
So, instead of setting a constant shipping price, let this module calculate a cost for shipping based on the customers’ location at the checkout stage.
Commerce Shipping can also be integrated well with other shipping modules, like Commerce Flat Rate or Commerce UPS. Indeed, it provides you the flexibility to tailor more complex shipping scenarios while your business grows at every stage.
Keeping track of your customers’ transactions has now become easier with Drupal’s e-commerce Invoice module, where you can generate invoices for each purchase, for yours and your customers’ records.
It has an abundance of invoice templates from which you can select the one that best suits your needs. Also, you have the option to view and download your invoices in PDF format, as needed.
Enterprises can boost their revenues per order with cross-selling and upselling techniques. Both Commerce Recommender and UberCart Recommender are the Drupal modules that you should install to enable cross-selling on the Drupal Commerce and Ubercart platforms, respectively.
Both modules help in triggering personalized messages and product recommendations for web users
Both modules help in triggering personalized messages and product recommendations for web users. The suggestions are based on users’ current orders and previous purchases.
This module also comes in handy when the user is new on the site and the software doesn’t have any prior purchase history to refer to for making any suggestions.
In such a scenario, these cross-selling modules analyze the purchase history of other users who previously bought the same product in the current order and hence recommend products that these users ordered in the past.
Even though phenomenal growth and new trends are being observed in leveraging social media, email marketing remains an undivided strategy of any online marketing plan.
Marketing and sales campaigns are regularly employed by sending emails to people on subscription lists.
The Mailjet module works on Drupal Commerce for running email marketing campaigns while the MailChimp E-commerce module supports both Drupal Commerce and Ubercart.
To get started with the module, you need to first signup with the respective company. The services are free, however, the email volume should be kept below a certain threshold.
Both modules enable site administrators to create email campaigns, personalize the marketing messages, and track campaign efficacy.
Learn more about the modules from the video
It is adept in automatically tweaking the display format of price information based on the location of each online shopper
E-commerce gets its customers on its radar from the farthest and remotest countries of the earth, with all having different local currencies. Thus, the online store should be capable enough of converting product prices for customers as per their geographical location. Besides, the freshly converted local amount must be showcased in a format that conforms to the customers’ regional convention.
This module specializes in converting world currencies based on stored exchange rates. Besides, it is adept in automatically tweaking the display format of price information based on the location of each online shopper.
This module identifies the visitors’ IP address to recognize his or her geographical location (the country) of the user and store it in its database.
You can also perform your lookup on the data via a function to use the data in the way you want to. Besides, it automatically updates the IP-country database and admin spoofing of an uncertain IP or Country for testing purposes.
The technology behind maintaining this database is for establishing a link between IP address and Country is hosted and maintained by ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, therefore the database is 98% accurate
With the aim to remarket the product to the customer that he or she left in the shopping cart, this module saves the product for a later purchase. Products added to the wishlist display image of the product, add to cart button, stock, and price.
It also comes with a wishlist page showcasing a similar interface to Commerce’s Shopping Cart and a block.
Recurly, when integrated within Drupal, relieves you from subscription billing service and management. It can work alongside your existing payment gateway or merchant account or you can use the included Recurly Gateway.
With basic integration from Drupal, it includes receiving push notifications from Recurly.com. It also comprises of built-in pages for users to view invoices, subscriptions, and to upgrade/downgrade their subscription level.
Customers can easily and securely make payments in your Drupal Commerce shop without needing to leave the site
The Commerce Stripe module integrates well with Drupal commerce to support the tokenized payment gateway. This way, customers can easily and securely make payments in your Drupal Commerce shop without needing to leave the site.
- Physical Field
The Physical Field module provides an API for storing and controlling physical measurements. It supports all kinds of unit conversions-
It lends its support to measurement types like Area, Length, Volume, and Weight.
It also supports these following field types-
- Physical measurement: Stores a single measurement and it’s unit.
- Physical dimensions like length, width, and height along with its unit.
Commerce Stock assists in stock management for Drupal Commerce stores.
The other features include enabling and disabling the add to cart form, checking the cart form submit, checkout submit, and review submit, stopping the user from checkout in case the order contains out of stock items, and advanced configuration of the add to cart button for more control.
This module adds coupon functionality to Drupal Commerce through integration with the Commerce Discount module. You can add any number of coupon codes to a discount. Customers need to enter coupon code during checkout to activate the related discount. If there are some terms and conditions on the discount that prevent it from being applied to the order, the customer will be notified of the same.
Otherwise, the discount will be applied and the customer will see that the coupon has been redeemed.
This checkout progress block has been added to the core. It adds a block visible on the checkout pages to find out on what step of the checkout process the user is currently on. The status is an unordered list with each checkout page title being an item.
The Commerce Message module integrates order-specific messages into it, such as order paid, product added to the cart, admin comment, order confirmation sent after checkout complete. A history view option appears to display all messages for a given order
Commerce File module widens the Commerce License ability to sell access to files. Whenever a user buys a product, he or she gets access to all files attached to that product’s commerce_file field.
This adding up of new files to the commerce_file field makes them available instantly to all the users who have an active license.
This module facilitates you to add new customer profile types for the Commerce module using a UI. So, in case you want another customer profile type other than the default billing pane in Commerce, then you can now easily do so by using this module.
Similar to that of adding fields to the billing profile type and controlling how the fields are displayed, you can add new profile types to the ones you create here too, using this module.
In the End
Drupal does not only work as a driving force for content but also makes up an essential element in designing your e-commerce site. You can leverage the best of both the worlds- Drupal’s flexibility as a CMS in combination with e-commerce, to suit your business no matter at what stage it is!
Further, knowing about the ideally-suited modules as per your requirements can help you in kicking off the ideal site, or to improve the site that you already have. Either way, you’ll need developers to install these modules for you.
Srijan Technologies can assist you in taking your site up a notch. Whether you have decided to switch to Drupal, or fine-tune your existing site; it can help you to assure the success of your e-commerce site. Talk to us now!
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