8 Modules Commerce Kickstart Didn't Include But Should Be On Your Commerce Site

Here at Fuse, we’ve been working on a few commerce projects lately. We've been using Commerce Kickstart as the base for some projects and customize to meet client business requirements. By using Kickstart, we no longer need to download a long list of modules and configure them individually, it saves us many hours of work and save money for our clients. For users that are new to Drupal, and want to have an online store, Commerce Kickstart is great. It comes with all the contributed modules that are necessary to run a basic online store. However, there are some modules that Kickstart doesn't include but should be on all Commerce sites. For newbies who installed Kickstart as their first Drupal site and don't know much about the thousands of contributed modules out there, the following list of modules should definitely be considered.

It provides a beautiful dashboard of your store’s sales. It uses different types of charts (line, pie and bar charts) to give you a sense of how the store is doing quickly.

It also comes with a handy tax report that might make your life easier when reconciling.

Learn how your customers found you on the web. Which page they first land on so you will know what your visitors are looking for. Here is a great tutorial on how to configure Google Analytics.

Automatically generate a sitemap for sending to search engine. This will help improve your search engine ranking and potentially bring more visitors to your store.

Another SEO module. Even though keyword meta tags are less important to search engine these days, title and description tags are still important. This module will let you set those tags automatically for all your pages.

This module will allows you to create a custom contact form or survey. It is a great way to let your customers to easily reach you and receive feedback.

All stores have some sort of form (signup, contact, etc) that customers have to fill out. If there is a form, spammers, hackers and bots will try to fill it out. It is as certain as taxes and death. Mollom significantly helps to reduce spam.

All e-commerce sites should be using SSL to transmit sensitive data. Customers will have more confidence when the site uses encryption.

So, this is our list. Please share any of your must-have' modules to add to the Kickstart distro or for Commerce in general.