These days, fewer consumers want to waste their time standing in lines or roaming around shopping malls in search of things they need. Why all that trouble? Just open up an e-commerce website, make a few clicks, and get nearly everything under the sun delivered right to your threshold.
Among numerous e-commerce solutions, Drupal is gaining more significance with every passing year. Although it doesn’t include e-commerce features by default, unlike such platforms as Shopify or Magento, Drupal 8 makes up for it with a well-developed system of modules.
If we run a search on the official Drupal website, it returns 1,756 e-commerce modules at the moment of writing this post. While that’s a huge number, you don’t need to install all of those extensions. Just find out what consumers value in an e-commerce solution above all and pick one module for each requirement.
What Do Customers Need in an E-Commerce Site Above All?
While many aspects are important for online stores to succeed, we believe that some areas are really crucial:
- SEO. Customers need to know about your offerings and should be able to find your store in the vast space of the Internet.
- Convenient purchasing procedure:
- The checkout process should be short and intuitive.
- There should be a number of payment channels for customers’ convenience.
- Prices should be calculated in all possible currencies.
- Customers should know exactly how much they will have to pay for shipment depending on their location.
- Customers should get a detailed invoice right after they’ve made a purchase.
When your e-commerce site is easy to use, it contributes to higher customer satisfaction, generates more traffic, and ultimately increases the conversion rate. Now, let’s review the top Drupal 8 modules that can make an e-commerce website more lucrative.
Our List of Top Drupal 8 E-Commerce Modules
SEO Checklist
This module helps Drupal site owners remember every SEO task required to improve their online store’s search engine visibility. The SEO Checklist will ensure you don’t forget to clean duplicate content, use keywords in headings, optimize images with descriptive ALT tags, or perform many other essential SEO tasks. You’ll be notified whenever you’ve missed one of the items on the list.
Moreover, if you’re not sure about the best way to handle a certain SEO task, the module will helpfully suggest the best options for you. The same thing happens if you’ve done something wrong from SEO’s point of view. The module will “complain” and tell you exactly what’s amiss.
We all know how frequently Google loves changing its search algorithm. With SEO Checklist, though, it’s not an issue, since it gets updated on a regular basis. Any of Google’s new rules are immediately reflected in the module’s list.
Ubercart
If you’re a small or mid-size business owner, you’ll find this module simply indispensable. It helps you create a ground-level shopping cart system in no time and with a minimum amount of effort.
You can use Ubercart for any type of business, starting from selling physical merchandise like furniture or electronics and ending with downloading digital products like PDF files. This module enables you to do the following:
- Add products to a configurable catalog
- Create and edit orders
- Automatically generate accounts
- Add multiple images for the same product
- Track stock and get warning messages when some items are about to run out
This list is far from complete. One of the most appealing Ubercart’s features is a one-page checkout — every e-commerce website owner’s dream. Customers don’t have to go through several forms on different pages until they can finally call something their own.
Ubercart also includes an integrated payment system. It lets you select various payment options such as credit card or check, as well as payment processors, including PayPal, CyberSource, and others. That’s what we meant when we stressed the need for several payment channels on an e-commerce site.
Currency
If your own country has suddenly become too small for your growing online business, you may want to move up to the international level. Then, you’ll have to adapt your online store for displaying prices in different currencies. That’s exactly what the Currency module is for.
- Convert currencies and present them in the appropriate format depending on a customer’s locale
- Show the necessary information about specific currencies
With Currency, you get the entire world covered. More profits without hassle!
Conclusion
The success of any e-commerce site depends to a large extent on a smooth user experience. If a customer can find an online store easily, have one checkout page instead of six, and pay in any currency via a gateway of his or her choice, the chance that he or she will become a regular is higher.
While the e-commerce modules we’ve described in this post are a great help for any Drupal-powered online shop manager, building a truly secure, SEO-friendly, and feature-rich site requires professional assistance.
The Site Slinger’s experienced Drupal developers can take care of many Drupal-related tasks including PSD to Drupal development. Just get in touch with us and let us turn your ideas into a perfect e-commerce solution.