Drupal E-Commerce websites - Challenges and Benefits
Drupal is the No.1 CMS used to build e-commerce websites. To make your business have a wider impact, an online e-commerce site is quintessential. According to Gartner's survey of 2015 marketing budgets and projection of 2016 expectations, they predict digital commerce as the mandate for driving profitable growth. The essential features that make Drupal the CMS of choice for e-commerce sites are that it is flexible, scalable and can be used to build websites of all sizes and complexities. The powerful Drupal CMS helps build sites that are secure, SEO friendly and most importantly mobile friendly. Drupal Commerce support multi-lingual, multi-currency websites.
Challenges of an e-Commerce Site
To have an e-commerce site up and running, it can take from a month to a year of development time depending on the requirements and the complexity of the site. For a single product limited features site, off the shelf- hosted solutions can be used, but they have limited features and its customization and up-gradation becomes costly. The challenges of an e-commerce site are of two types:
Development challenges are in the area of ,developing custom themes, integrating and developing tax modules and specific payment gateways.
Management challenges include getting the right logistics partner, content marketing, building trust in your site, generating loyalty, using analytics to measure performance and understanding gaps in the running of an online store.
Key benefits of Drupal Commerce
The contributed and inbuilt modules in Drupal enable getting a basic e-commerce website up quickly and efficiently. With the Drupal commerce module, you can add and display products, manage orders, establish payment methods through a variety of gateways like PayPal, Amazon and eBay integration, offer discounted pricing, support tax and VAT calculations, include a physical store locator and many more. Whatever possible problem you are facing in building an eCommerce site, someone else would have comes across it too and in all likelihood would have overcome that issue, making it available to the Drupal community at large.
The client can have a full-fledged commerce site which is easily scalable. It doesn't need to be rebuild for incorporating latest features as it happens in the case of, off the shelf shopping carts. Furthermore,the site can be customized to their unique needs.
Since Drupal is an open source technology framework, the cost will be lesser to provide excellent features in the form of plugin modules.
Some of the features that can be added with extra time are shipping partners, multiple payment options, order validation automation, bulk order uploading and google analytics.
Zyxware Technologies has eCommerce competency and have Commerce platforms which can be customized based on the requirement. Since we have dedicated platforms on proven technology, customization can be done in 2 weeks or more based on the number and complexity of features sought. Thus a tailor made solution can be delivered in less than a month’s time. Or if you already have an eCommerce site, but would like to add some extra features to combat fraud, increase traffic to your site through search engine optimization et cetera, please contact us.
References
[1].https://www.drupal.org/resource-guides/building-ecommerce
[2].https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/session/future-commerce-drupal-8-and-beyond.html8.
