Drupal

If you are looking for an easy way to implement a drupal shopping cart, using Ubercart is one of your best options.  I came to this conclusion in my article on Drupal shopping cart options.  Many out there might go for the best of breeds model, which leads you to developing your website and integrating a third party shopping cart from scratch, but why do that?  Drupal already has support for Ubercart as a shopping cart.

The Drupal Twitter module is an answer to a problem that I had been looking for a solution to.  A fundamental part of a good traffic creation strategy is to ping social networking sites when you create content on your site.  As a part of that ping process, you want to have a description/title of whatever content you produce and a link back to your website to the full article.  The main purpose is so that you can drive traffic back to your website to consume your content.

How this works with the social networks is that in Twitter for example, everyone that is following you would see a tweet that you just posted to your blog.  But doing this manually every time you post to your blog or create an article would be time consuming.  Luckily, there are automatic pinging module available for Drupal called the Drupal Twitter module.

It works by saving your Twitter account username/password, then every time you post something, it will go out and automatically create a Tweet for you.  Its really simple, I actually found a tutorial to show you how to install the Drupal Twitter module.

I have recently started looking at how to handle taking credit card payments for goods or services from a website. And since I implement sites in drupal, I geared my search towards shopping cart implementations in drupal.

So here are my requirements in searching for a shopping cart to use with drupal (or any CMS):

• Shopping cart must be free and open source.
• Shopping cart must support multiple payment processing companies to avoid single-sourcing.
• The module available for Drupal must be stable and have supporting modules around it for customization.
• Must support taking credit card payments. Other payment options are bonus.
• Reports on transactions are necessary to track user behavior and optimize revenue. Reporting interface that supports customizations is bonus. Must at least allow exporting data out to generate custom reports.
• Be able to calculate shipping easily. The world is used to the amazon's and buy.com's, they should expect nothing less at my site.
• Be able to customize the look and feel of the shopping cart. It shouldn't be branded to look like an advertisement for the shopping cart company.

Well yeah I'm kinda picky! I don't think that a small site should have to settle for much less than the big boys!

After looking around Paypal's huge list of supported shopping carts, the one I found that was free, open source, and has great module support in drupal is Ubercart. They support payment processing through Paypal Website Payments Pro and Authorize.net, and others. This enables credit card and check processing, and many eBay shoppers are very familiar with PayPal and probably already have accounts.

And one of the things that can make or break an open source software product for me is the availability and quality of the documentation available either from the open source project itself or the community. After browsing around the documentation directly on Ubercart, it was obvious that the software was designed to be easy to use and well documented.

So I'm really excited because I've found a pure open source solution to a common ecommerce problem. I think I always had a false notion in my head that there were high barriers of entry to making a ecommerce site because of all the fees and cost that would be involved in finding a shopping cart and payment processing method, but that doesn't exist anymore thanks to Drupal and Ubercart. The only cost really involved now is the fees by the payment processor for handling the credit cards and other payment options. More on that another day...