Whether you’re building your first ecommerce site, or you’ve decided that it’s time for an upgrade, finding the best CMS (content management system) for your site can be the greatest obstacle in the planning process. On your search, one of the most important factors to consider is the ecommerce store you’ll be using.

Most platforms have their own ecommerce store module. For example, Drupal has Drupal Commerce, WordPress has WooCommerce, and Joomla has jCart. While WooCommerce is possibly the most well-known, used for the top 22% of ecommerce sites on the Internet (Barn2Media), that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best ecommerce solution.

While WooCommerce is a great tool and used by many organizations, most medium to enterprise-level organizations may need more powerful and robust support for the online side of their business. If your organization could benefit from an ecommerce solution with these qualities, here are 10 things that you’ll love about Drupal Commerce.  

1. Built on an enterprise CMS.

As noted, one of the greatest advantages of Drupal Commerce is its ability to support small and enterprise-level organizations alike. According to Centarro (formerly the Commerce Guys), the creators of Drupal Commerce, Drupal Commerce is the only one built onto an enterprise-level CMS, making it a greatly scalable system for your online business.

The Commerce Guys go on to elaborate that not only does this provide the support that enterprise-level online businesses need, but it provides a stronger connection between ecommerce features and your content. This ensures that it’s simple for most anyone on your team to keep your site and product listings up-to-date and ready for your customers.

2. Designed with marketers in mind.

When you think about a powerful ecommerce system, you may have concerns that the system will be too complicated for your marketing team to use. However, the Commerce Guys took into account that many ecommerce sites are managed by marketers, who may have limited technical experience.

Because of Drupal Commerce’s connection with the CMS, marketers (or whoever else may be managing your site) can easily update product pages to start campaigns from within Drupal. Thanks to its simple administrative user experience, your marketing team should be able to implement their latest marketing ideas, without waiting for help from your IT team.

3. Easy to install with Commerce Kickstart.

Not every Drupal module is user-friendly and easy to install, but there is an easier path to installing Drupal Commerce. For Drupal 7 users, simply install Commerce Kickstart, a tool also built by Centarro. Commerce Kickstart is essentially an out-of-the-box demo for Drupal Commerce, packed with all the must-have ecommerce features (discussed later).

For Drupal 8 users, however, installing Commerce Kickstart requires a slightly different approach. As you may already know, Drupal 8 brought about many big changes to the CMS, forcing Centarro to rethink how they’d approach Commerce Kickstart. As a result, the team chose to make Commerce Kickstart installation possible through Composer instead.

4. Meets every basic ecommerce need.

This may be a given, but the beauty of installing Drupal Commerce, especially with the help of Commerce Kickstart, is that it immediately provides your site with the necessary built-in configurations and modules for getting your ecommerce store off the ground and running.

As noted previously, Commerce Kickstart is essentially what its name claims to be: a “kickstart” for your ecommerce store. This demo cuts out weeks of development time by rolling out a sample ecommerce site that you can interact with and easily manipulate to meet your needs.

Check out the 5-minute video tour of Commerce Kickstart here.

5. Flexibility for customization.

While your ecommerce store will likely benefit from most (if not all) of the features provided by the Commerce Kickstart module, your business is unique and likely has unique needs as a result. When it comes to Drupal Commerce, however, there’s no need to worry about limitations.

One of the key features of Drupal Commerce is its flexible design. As both a modular and configurable system, this system is prepared to accommodate the sales of both physical products to online-only content. Likewise, it supports subscription-based business models, among others.

6. Created using open source code.

Most ecommerce tools, from WooCommerce for WordPress to Magento, aren’t free. Many are subject to transaction-based fees or subscription-based fees, but because Drupal Commerce is open source, using this store for your site is entirely free.

In case you’re not familiar, the term ‘open source’ indicates code that can be freely modified and distributed among users within that open source community—a community any software developer is welcome to join. Drupal itself is an open source framework as well, greatly reducing the costs and increasing the quality of the software product you receive.

7. Extensibility with modules.

Since Drupal Commerce is a part of the open source community, your ecommerce store has the opportunity to be modified and improved through modules. Users within the Drupal community develop contributed modules that can extend the power and flexibility of your Drupal site, as well as your Drupal Commerce store.

Some features you may wish to add your ecommerce store may include shipping, which can be done with the Commerce Shipping module, or subscription-based billing, which can be done with Commerce Recurring. For more information, visit Centarro’s guide on extending with modules or their running list of compatible modules.

8. Variety of ecommerce themes.

Not only can your budget and your site’s functionality benefit from working with open source software, but open source also provides the opportunity to choose from a variety of Drupal ecommerce themes. You can search for potential themes on Drupal.org or visit Centarro’s list of compatible themes.

9. Reliability from over 10 years of contribution.

Because every tool available on Drupal is built by Drupal contributors, that means that not every Drupal module or theme is made alike. That said, it can sometimes be difficult to find tools that are up-to-date or regularly maintained for bug fixes, but Drupal Commerce can’t be lumped into the category of poorly functioning modules.

Rather, Drupal Commerce was first created and released for use with Drupal 7 in 2010. Since then, Centarro has regularly maintained their contribution for the past decade to ensure it provides ecommerce store owners a desirable experience for both themselves and their users. In this way, it’s no surprise that over 50,000 users have used the tool.

10. Ample security for your online store.

Everything about Drupal Commerce may sound great up to this point, but none of that would matter if the tool can’t keep yours and your customers’ information secure. Thankfully, Centarro values security as much as you do and created the tool with security in mind.

As long as you keep Drupal Commerce up-to-date, your site will acquire the regular bug fixes and patches that keep it safe from potential threats. Moreover, Drupal in and of itself has built-in security features that provide an added layer of security for your online business.  

Need Help Installing Drupal Commerce?

These are just 10 reasons to fall in love with Drupal Commerce—and there are many more that we’ve neglected to mention. Because Drupal Commerce is open source, you can install the tool on your own at no cost to you! However, doing so requires familiarity with Drupal and technical skills. If you’re not a seasoned player in that department, we can help.

At ClikFocus, we’ve provided organizations like yours with custom ecommerce and membership solutions that provide results. Our in-depth knowledge and experience with Drupal development ensure that your project is in good hands: The sky’s the limit with what we can do using our favorite CMS.

To get started on your Drupal Commerce site, let’s chat today!