Being one of the fastest growing e-Commerce solutions around the world today, Drupal Commerce is now an international solution. The Commerce guys describe Drupal Commerce as a tool that brings together the three C’s – Content, Community and Commerce and makes sure that your e-Commerce software can build and engage your audience while continuing to drive sales. You can get the best of both worlds – enterprise level Content management system and a well-supported e-Commerce platform. Drupal Commerce gives the marketer the power to launch campaigns, manage them, change content, change blocks, modify the page, etc. – all this without having to write code or get tech help.
The good just got better. Yes, Drupal Commerce is now out with their new and enhanced version of itself – Drupal 2.x! This content-driven open-source e-Commerce platform makes online retailing easier and effective. Built on Drupal, Drupal Commerce has a number of modules that are flexible and extensible to be able to tailor-fit your e-Commerce architecture. Even SEO is handled really well largely due to the fact that it is content-driven – which means you can sell your stuff and have a lot of content about your products, both in the same website!
What’s New?
Tons of improvements have been made in Drupal 2.x with regard to product workflows, UX and architecture. There’s also more functionality and features out of the box which makes it a lot easier to start a new commerce project.
The cool new installer makes it simple for any user to download and install Drupal commerce 2.x. You will be able to build all the components, put them together, generate some fancy composer news, etc.
Some terminologies have changed to make it more user-friendly, like instead of Nodes, they have two entity types – Product and Product variations. Payment methods are now called Payment gateways.
Features like Promotions and Coupons which were slightly buggy in version 1.x are now fixed – very usable and solid.
In Commerce 1.x, the product architecture wasn’t very user-friendly. Adding products are much more structured now since the product variations handle the different attributes and variations of each product.
Order states
Order states are well defined now. For example, in Commerce 1.x, all checkout statuses were grouped into one ‘checkout’ state. Which was very vague since there are many possible states under a ‘checkout’ status like Checkout Review, Checkout Payment, Checkout Complete, etc. Now the order workflow is split into multiple workflows – order, checkout, payment and fulfillment. Difference order types can now use different workflows.
Payments
Payments are now rock solid and much improved. Firstly, the time taken to implement payment gateways has drastically reduced (cut down by one third) while he functionality has increased. It now integrates with over 30 payment gateways!
Tokenization
Tokenization is used for everything now. Tokens are basically references to credit cards that are given by the payment gateway once the card details are passed on to them. That way, you will not be storing any card information on your server and there is nothing to get compromised. This is great for PCI compliance. Modern gateways like Stripe and Braintree have a Javascript layer that grabs the card number from the user’s browser and delivers the token via Javascript. So, you don’t have to store the card information in your server even for a fraction of a second.
Multi-currencies
Multi-currency is now supported as Commerce 2.x now uses Google’s library to handle any currency in the world. You need to know how to format the numbers of different currencies based on what symbol it uses, decimal points – if any, commas, separators, language of the currency, etc.
Shipments
A lot of things have changed for the better with Drupal Commerce 2.x, but the best and most significant milestone achievement has to be the Shipments API. In 1.x, when they said ‘Shipments’, they meant you could get shipping rates. Period. In order to actually ship the item, you would need to integrate with another system.
But now with Commerce 2.x, you can actually ship a product! And get shipping rates too. An order fulfillment process involves all the steps right from the placement of the order till the shipment of an order. And now with the Shipping API, an order can be fully fulfilled. Calculating duties, putting things on boxes, handling returns, printing labels with barcodes (which need to work for your delivery service like UPS or Fedex), handling box sizes, etc.
With Drupal 8, everything is now a plugin interface. You can customize it the way you want to. You can also replace any of the shipping process steps with third party providers. For example, you could use Amazon for your fulfillment process or your deliver service providers to take care of your boxing part.
Drupal Commerce is an extremely flexible and customizable e-Commerce framework that you can further build upon to suit your unique business needs. Drupal Commerce 1.x, however, lacked some vital components like order fulfillment, secure payments and the very important - shipping. Some modules that were a little buggy and not-so-easy-to use, are now solid and very user-friendly. As a Drupal development company, Specbee provides you with the expertise to build and support your e-Commerce website powdered by Drupal Commerce and Drupal CMS.
