E-commerce opportunities are endless nowadays. More and more business owners decide to hire e-commerce developers and skim the cream off online sales. Today, we will describe the new opportunities offered by Drupal Commerce 2.16.
Drupal e-commerce development
Drupal e-commerce development has a lot to offer to customers. The arrival of the Drupal Commerce 2.0 stable release in September 2017 marked the new era of feature-rich, user-friendly, modern, and fast Drupal 8 stores.
With the Commerce 2 features in mind, our colleagues from Drudesk have described 10+ reasons why you should create an e-commerce website in Drupal. Every day, there are new e-commerce opportunities added to Drupal Commerce. For example, we wrote about the increased shopping cart usability with the new Cart Flyout module.
This is due to the fact that the DC’s creators, the Centarro team (formerly Commerce Guys), keep working on it and creating new updates. So let’s take a closer look at what’s new in its latest release — 2.16.
New e-commerce opportunities in Drupal Commerce 2.16 release
Commerce 2.16 release came on December 11, 2019. It looks like a Christmas present for all Drupal Commerce 2 website owners who can schedule an update and enjoy the new opportunities. The news should also be interesting for all who are just thinking about getting an e-commerce store or migrating to DC from other platforms. Here are a few of the new opportunities it brings.
Shopping cart expiration
Shopping cart abandonment is a common phenomenon for online stores. Users lose their interest or are simply not ready to buy, so they abandon the cart. Marketers use abandoned cart reminders as a good opportunity to get the customers back.
But this time, we are concerned with the website’s performance. It suffers from it having to keep abandoned carts as order entities in the database. For high-traffic e-commerce sites, this can mean thousands of abandoned carts.
They need to be cleaned up from time to time, which is why the e-commerce cart expiration options are needed. As of the version 2.16, you can set the number of days for the cart to expire and with every Cron run, the corresponding carts will be discovered and queued to be automatically deleted.
This work used to be performed by the Commerce Cart Expiration module in D7 and now it is included in the DC main package.
Sales promotion start and end times
Promotions are always great selling opportunities. As of version 2.16, you can add more than just the start and end date, you can also add the start and end time of each promotion. The exact time really matters to avoid confusion with buyers.
In addition, it should be noted that different customers have different time zones. The creators of Commerce 2.16 have taken this into account by adding a timezone field where you can specify your promotion’s timezone.
Integration with Views
The amazingly popular query builder that gives you the opportunities to display content in any way you wish, Views, is part of Drupal 8 core. However, there was no smooth field integration between it and Drupal Commerce until now.
This has been fixed by writing a Views integration class for the Commerce ecosystem — CommerceEntityViewsData.
Tax rates specific to products
Shops often need to apply particular taxes or no taxes at all to particular products. This used to require the development of a custom tax resolver. The DC creators have created the opportunities for everyone to set the product-specific taxes from the UI.
To achieve this, they built the Commerce Product Tax contributed module. They want to hear the feedback about it and then include it into the main package.
Move to Drupal Commerce 2.16 with us!
All the above opportunities are new to the release 2.16. Drop us a line and let’s discuss how you can benefit from Drupal e-commerce. Our team is ready to help you:
- update your store to the newest version
- move to Drupal Commerce from another platform
- create an e-commerce website from scratch
Contact our Drupal development agency and enjoy all the opportunities you could have from your store!