Slick e-commerce equals Drupal and UberCart... and sometimes Magento

Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) which can be extended to provide e-commerce facilities with a module called UberCart. There are a couple of areas in which it is particularly powerful:

Selling access to content or digital products
In this situation all the benefits of Drupal's content management, search, rating and user experience features are available and transactions can be seamlessly processed with a basket.

Purchases (access to a video, download of a PDF, purchase of a book etc) can be easily managed using 'out of the box' UberCart features. Because everything involved is standard Drupal content, delivering reviews, recommendations and trailers is straightforward.

For example, the UberCart digital product purchase settings may be configured so users can login and download their purchased PDFs at any point in the future, providing a useful 'library' service.

We provided Drupal consultancy on the build of www.franklyecommerce.com, which makes extensive use of UberCart's features to allow users to buy access to online video training resources and a learning community.

A user experience integrated with the 'main' site
Without UberCart often a clunky external shopping cart program will be re-branded to (sort of) look like the main website and entail a whole separate system to be maintained and managed.

Users may be asked to register again to purchase (annoying and clunky) and it's very hard to cross promote products on the 'main' site, for example there is no site-wide basket.

There are the obvious sales benefits of being able to promote products effectively site-wide, as well as reduced friction on purchases through the use of existing registration details.

Because UberCart is just another Drupal module, it makes it a very good value way to add e-commerce to an existing site, as all the investment in features and style is utilised and only the e-commerce 'extras' need to be considered.

A simple example that we configured for a youth orientated, UK non-profit is www.participationworks.org.uk/order-resources

Alternatives
The other e-commerce platform we frequently use is Magento. Magento is a great platform when you have relatively standard e-commerce requirements, not much additional content and want a feature rich platform on a reasonable budget. www.fleshtunnel.co.uk is a good example of a Magento site that we delivered that required a striking design but no bespoke functionality.

In order for Magento to manage more significant amounts of content or deliver bespoke features the required budget increases significantly as there isn't the same rich set of modules and platform available as there is with Drupal. However because Magento is a dedicated e-commerce platform it does have excellent sales reporting, payment gateway and shipping support out of the box.