Dear readers, once we told you about building social shopping projects with Drupal.
Now it’s time to discuss Drupal ecommerce benefits. Let the big shopping begin! ;)
Lush, Guerlain, Cartier, Sportmaster, USAopoly, Chicco, Le Livre de Poche, Cascada Expediciones, Zondervan, DAFF...What is in common between these brands? More than just the fact that they have awesome ecommerce websites. Once, making a decision to build an online shop and driving their “shopping cart” through the “market” of lucrative offers (WordPress, Magento, Prestashop, Joomla and other ecommerce solutions), their owners chose Drupal and were right. Why? Let's see. We'll go into details and discover why we think Drupal is the best ecommerce solution.
An all-in-one system: ecommerce + content
Internet users, as well as the latest Google algorithms, appreciate good content. Thus, content marketing has become an important issue in everyone’s marketing strategy.
That’s why, using standalone ecommerce platforms such as Magento or Prestashop, you might also need an additional content management system for working with content. This may mean more effort/investment/time to make the two separate platforms work seamlessly together, as well as to manage them in the future, to run marketing, SEO campaigns and more.
With Drupal, everything’s different. Drupal offers both an awesome content management system and a robust online marketing platform, “all in one”. Ubercart and Drupal Commerce, the two great Drupal ecommerce solutions (extensions for ecommerce), are really deeply integrated into the Drupal CMS to enjoy all its power and offer you all the convenience.
Any content type for social engagement
You can engage more deeply with your customers, promote your products and boost your sales by means of regularly updated interesting blogs, forums, product ratings and an unlimited amount of any other interactive content. All this stuff is easily added to Drupal ecommerce websites. Product listings with images, sliders, videos, polls anywhere on your site - sky’s the limit to your creativity!
Easy-to-manage ecommerce websites
The content on Drupal ecommerce websites is easily created, edited and updated. You can manage orders, products, create category menus, variations of your products with multiple colors, sizes and much more. Everything is done through a convenient and intuitively understandable interface, highly customizable to fit your needs.
Drupal offers advanced options for user and role management like granting permissions, controlling access, retrieving passwords, customizing profiles, etc. Surely, Drupal’s management tools are very flexible for any administration task you might need.
High performance: Drupal “got the power!” :)
Thanks to built-in caching, scalable databases and other performance-enhancing features, websites built with Drupal usually have high loading speed and fast response time. This is crucial for online shops. Customers won’t wait! Besides, Drupal is very good at handling websites with many users and many pages, which is usually true for online shops. The same can hardly be said about, for example, WordPress CMS that is good mostly for ecommerce websites with up to 100 products. That’s another reason to call Drupal the best ecommerce CMS.
Extensibility and third-party system integration
Drupal's ecommerce websites are very flexible and extensible to meet your website’s changing needs. You can have any feature enhancement or third-party system integration. Whatever system you need to connect your ecommerce website to - Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Amazon, Google Maps and more - will be to your service in just a few minutes. Magic! :)
Payment options for your customers
Talking about ecommerce websites, we would like to pay special attention to payment system integration. Drupal allows easy integration with PayPal, Realex Payments, Stripe, SagePay, WorldPay, ROBOKASSA and many other systems. Your customers may choose their preferred payment method from your list. It’s possible to install a secured payment gateway system.
Security is the key
Drupal CMS has a good track record for security. Its built-in security features are an especially important advantage for ecommerce websites which regularly deal with payments and clients’ data. Drupal informs the users of common security vulnerabilities and gives them security reports. The Drupal community constantly works on enhancing the security level of the CMS.
SEO-friendliness
Drupal is designed to be SEO-friendly. Just some of the features that help Google find Drupal websites better are as follows. On Drupal ecommerce websites, users can write dynamic, SEO-friendly URLs that are better for ecommerce SEO than automatically generated URLs. Internal generation of XML sitemaps is possible in Drupal.
Drupal is free
All the essential Drupal modules are free, so you can find a great number of useful extensions for your ecommerce website - with WordPress, for example, you would have to pay for lots of plugins. However, if you don’t find the required Drupal modules, you can always hire Drupal CMS development company who will create custom modules for special functionality on your website. A fabulous website is closer than you might think!
We hope we've been convincing about the benefits of Drupal for ecommerce websites. Well, maybe, in the collection of great online shops there's one missing...it's your future site ;) Time to add it there! We'll do it with pleasure! :)