Using Drupal and Ubercart for eCommerce

Although Drupal might look hard to learn, it is not. You can easily learn the basics even if you’re not a designer or developer.

Every Drupal site has an administrative area which is customizable and you can create a multi-select professional contact form.

Web templates change the look and feel of your new site. Templates in Drupal are called-Themes. You can use ready theme and eventually customize it by changing its CSS and HTML, or you can code separate Photoshop design into a template. The latter requires you to slice all images prior to coding. And there are some milestones you need to know when creating a Drupal template.

In order to create a searchable Drupal site you need to set your URL to Clean URL, which is very easy to enable by going to Administer/Site configuration and enable the clean url option.

Starting with Drupal.

If you are installing Drupal 7 you'll notice that it’s a one click install. No need to create a database. All is set-up for you with the install of Drupal.

If you want to install Drupal 6, however, you’ll have to create own database.

• Built to be flexible, designed to be enhanced and modified (by the dozens of contributed Drupal modules and themes.). The core systems of Ubercart, including products, checkout, orders, payments, and order fulfillment are all designed to incorporate contributed modules.No hacking of code required to add functionality to your site! Just enable a module, configure the settings, and get to work.
• Built as a module package for the search engine friendly Drupal CMS, meaning you can fully integrate your store.
• The aim for usability, reflected in testing, changing things, testing again, changing more things, and ultimately letting you customize how all the pieces fit together yourself.

Everything in Drupal is a node. A node is a data structure which is used to produce different objects. And products are nodes; they contain all kinds of custom data fields in addition to the standard product picture, product price, description, etc.

A significant number of photos can be uploaded for a Product. They form Galleries for more convenient viewing.

Adding products to Cart is fast and easy. All is done in a pop-up, where a status message shows.

It's nice that the Shopping Cart can be viewed from the every page. Promotions like voucher and coupon are allowed - customers can conveniently use this feature to receive a discount.

Taxonomy is way to organize label and display content. For example, here we have “Category” taxonomy.

As you can see, here we have the flexibility to choose from two different types.

Normally, in Drupal, you can create Content Types. Since Product is such content type,product classes are sort of a sub-Content Type. For example, if you’re selling a number of stuff – shirts, dresses, bathroom stuff, etc., you’d like to have custom fields for each of them. So, you can assign different fields to different classes without creating additional content types.

Shipping in Ubercart is pretty nice. It has support to several carriers, some of which UPS. We can assign flat shipping rates or set shipping zones. Shipping zones are prior specified, like Zone 1 is 5 USD; Zone 2-10 USD, etc. This allows you not to use any carrier but ship on our own.

Payment options in Ubercart are pretty flexible. There’s a bunch of different pre-built modules for gateways like Authorize.net, Paypal.com, e-pay which are handy and can be used.

Taxes module calculates taxes based on states. 

Ubercart supports coupons. Various types of coupons can be applied to products site wide.

Ubercart allows assigning different roles to different users. That way you can easily control the user flow to your site, or simply reward certain role user. 

Order tracking provides you with detailed information about the customer, order status

You can view, edit, or delete any order. You can view the information associated to any order. And even can review the invoice that is issued to order. Invoices can be printed (see printable versions) or e-mailed, as well.

Example: order sorting, order-tracking, detailed info.

Stock module is not necessary to be used but it’s quite handy.

In order to set the stock settings you need to go to edit page of a product and there click the tab Stock.

You can set a Threshold and Stock numbers to that product and activate the option.

Threshold measures the critical number of specific product in stock, and stock shows the number of products right now. So when the threshold number is reached the admin receives an auto e-mail saying that the minimum is being reached, so you need to supply more products. When you set numbers for Stock and threshold, and click activate box, the system will document every time that product is bought.

As the title says this package is developed on Drupal and using Ubercart. Besides the features described above there are also the following features:

• CMS install and setting
• Site Categories Administration
• Creating and Managing Profile
• Registration & Login
• Add & Edit Content/Pages
• Comment Settings
• YouTube Video Embed
• Custom Breadcrumb
• E-mail Management
• Block Administration
• Auto Back-up
• Online Contact Form
• Meta Tags/Keywords Administration
• User admin/moderation
• Administer content
• Google Analytics
• Back orders
• Invoice
• Order history and administration
• Availability Reports
• Custom discounts for special customers
• Quantity based discount
• Mail to customer on order/shipment
• Display / do not display product on stock out
• Products viewed report
• Sell downloadable products
• New orders
• Product Rating by users
• Send newsletter
• Shipping features
• Credit Card Payment
• Bank-ware
• Country settings
• VAT rate options
• CODs, Mail order and online payment authentication
• Gift on purchase
• Product catalogue
• Basic and advanced search features
• Configure Featured products
• Integration with major online shipping providers
• Currency display options
• Promotions
• Send e-mail
• Send to friend
• PayPal Gateway Integration