Using Drupal, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9. Online Store

Many businesses, both large and small, would like to take better advantage of their web presence by selling their products or services directly online. Setting up ecommerce, however, can be a very daunting task. There are several options with varying complexity. Many hosting providers offer ecommerce or “shopping cart” packages that may be either included with your web hosting plan or available for purchase. With other services, such as PayPal, you can enable online purchases by using an HTML form that submits to their processing system. There are still more options for using dedicated ecommerce packages, both open source and proprietary, that you host and configure. The biggest issue with all of these methods tends to be the lack of integration with the rest of the website—all shopping cart and checkout functions take place within the other, external system.

This chapter will introduce the following modules:

Drupal Commerce (http://drupal.org/project/commerce)

Provides a full ecommerce package for running an online store

Feeds (http://drupal.org/project/feeds)

Provides data import capabilities for Drupal

Rules (http://drupal.org/project/rules)

Provides a means of clicking together custom programming logic

To follow along with the hands-on examples in this chapter, install Drupal using the Online Store installation profile, which installs Drupal with a few sample users and basic settings, as shown in Figure 9-1 and found at http://store.usingdrupal.com. For more ...