Why Creating an E-Commerce Site with Drupal 8/9 and Drupal Commerce Is a Good Idea: 5 Reasons

Learn why creating an e-commerce website with Drupal 8/9 and Drupal Commerce is the right decision.

Looking for a suitable platform to build an online store? Among many possible choices, Drupal 8/9 coupled with the Drupal Commerce extension is one of the best options, hands down. In this post, we explain what benefits your business gets when you create an e-commerce website in Drupal.

E-commerce is currently on the rise. The list of its standard benefits, such as borderless, round-the-clock business without the overhead of renting an office (on the part of the seller) or visiting a brick-and-mortar store (on the part of the customer), now includes an environment free of health hazards.

According to some projections, retail e-commerce sales in the United States are expected to reach 476.5 billion US dollars by 2024. This motivates more people to open Internet stores in search of (seemingly) easy income. Numerous e-commerce platforms available on the market these days enable practically anyone to have an online shop up and running within a short time span.

That said, having a working e-commerce site is only the first tiny step on the road to success. As time goes by, online merchants may suddenly discover that the platform they’ve chosen is not up to the mark when it comes to managing the content on their site.

To address this issue, site owners use external add-ons or hire programmers to tweak the system at the core level. However, since all these modifications don’t come from the vendor, they may not be 100% compatible with the original platform and, thus, cause errors and glitches. This results in unstable performance and revenue loss.

That’s why picking a system that flawlessly combines content management and e-commerce features is crucial. The Drupal team was well aware of this need and came up with a perfect duo: the Drupal CMS plus Drupal Commerce module.

Since you’re reading this post, you must be wondering what benefits you get when you create an e-commerce website with Drupal 8/9 and Drupal Commerce. Below, we discuss the most notable of these.

5 Compelling Reasons for Creating an E-Commerce Website with Drupal 8/9 and Drupal Commerce

Reason #1: You Get Two Powerful Systems Rolled into One

Consider Drupal 8/9 and Drupal Commerce two LEGO pieces, a bow and an arrow, a lock and a key, the King and the Queen… The list of associations goes on. In short, these two software products are simply meant to be together.

Most e-commerce platforms need to be integrated with external content management systems. These may have many inconsistencies and quirks, so site owners have to spend valuable time trying to fit two systems together. Even if they do manage to achieve an adequate result, they will have to keep the two systems in order individually: update them, back them up, fix security issues, and so on. This doubles up effort and time.

By contrast, when you create an e-commerce website that uses Drupal 8/9 and Drupal Commerce, you get two systems impeccably merged with one another. Drupal 8/9 allows you to handle the content management side: change product descriptions, write blog posts, create landing pages, and do other content marketing stuff. Drupal Commerce, in turn, takes care of all the things e-commerce, such as book and order management, payment processing, tax calculations, and so on.

There’s no need to waste time trying to integrate the two software packages. They “know” everything about one another. You have to maintain just one system instead of two — a great money and time saver.

You can also easily reference your product descriptions from various locations on the website, such as a landing page or blog. This way, you can count on love from Google and the like. The better search engine visibility you achieve, the higher your website will rank, and, thus, draw more traffic.

Reason #2: You Get an Accessible Website

Accessibility is an important aspect for every website, but it’s a particularly burning issue for e-commerce sites. An online store that ignores the needs of people with disabilities is likely to land into trouble right after launch. Legal problems, loss of revenue, and getting penalized by search engines — these are just a few possible reasons to take accessibility very seriously.

If you decide to create an e-commerce website in Drupal 8/9, you get accessibility features off the shelf. For example, all alt tags for images must have descriptions, and all Drupal 8/9 themes have a contrast ratio suitable for visitors with poor eyesight. For more information related to accessibility in Drupal 8/9, read one of our previous blog posts.

Reason #3: By Creating an E-Commerce Website with Drupal 8/9, You Cater to Customers from Every Corner of the World

One of the greatest advantages of e-commerce, as we mentioned before, is trade without borders. Just place your online store on a server and make it visible to people across the globe, regardless of distance and time.

This is not enough, though. You should also make your content available in appropriate regional languages for customers in different countries. This will build trust and draw more traffic to your store.

When you create an e-commerce website in Drupal 8/9 and Drupal Commerce, you save yourself a lot of time and effort as far as localization is concerned. Drupal is probably the best platform when it comes to building multilingual sites. It puts several language-related core modules at your disposal.

For example, the Interface Translation module lets you translate your store’s UI with ease, while the Content Translation module does the same thing with your content. All you have to do is set them up properly. For more on Drupal’s multilingual capabilities, read this other post on our blog.

Reason #4: You Get a Fast Website That’s Easy to Extend and Scale

A successful online store “grows out of its clothes” sooner or later and needs to scale to accommodate for an increased traffic. New functionality needs to be added. By creating an e-commerce website with Drupal 8/9, you need not worry about scalability at all.

To begin with, both the CMS and Drupal Commerce provide a great number of core and contributed modules that can handle almost any task imaginable, from creating custom forms to working with currencies and calculating discounts.

If this is not enough, the systems can be extended further by leveraging various application programming interfaces or APIs for short. Through these, Drupal websites can consume all kinds of external services, from social media to tracking shipments.

Drupal REST API has also decoupled its backend from its frontend. Thanks to this, developers can now use any technologies for building UIs of Drupal-powered websites, such as the popular JavaScript frameworks Vue.js, React.js, or Angular.js. As a result, sites run considerably faster than they used to. Speed is a great conversion-boosting factor. No customer wants to wait for a site to load more than a couple of seconds.

In addition, REST API has diversified the channels through which customers can access an online store. Whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, laptop, Mac, or PC, visitors work with the same database. This lets you engage a much wider audience and, thus, raise even more substantial revenue.

For more information on Drupal 8’s third-party integration capabilities, read this post on our blog.

Reason #5: You Get a Website that No Hacker Will Be Able to Exploit

One look at the cybersecurity statistics for 2020 is enough to understand how serious the situation is for all businesses. For e-commerce stores, cybersecurity takes on particular significance. A data breach can cause a wide range of problems, including customers’ financial details ending up in the wrong hands.

Creating an e-commerce website with Drupal 8/9 and Drupal Commerce lets you feel well-protected against any security threats. The Drupal 8/9 software package is a paragon of security in its own right. There is also a dedicated group of Drupal pros committed to ensuring absolute security of the system itself and the modules.

Once a new security fix sees the light of day, site owners can immediately start using it. Scammers simply have no time to wreak havoc.

Conclusion

These are just five reasons why creating an e-commerce site with Drupal 8/9 and Drupal Commerce is the right move. There are certainly more. Even these reasons, though, are enough to show that by choosing these free, open-source technologies you get a secure, scalable, fast, accessible, and Google-friendly online store with excellent content management capabilities. That’s a good prerequisite for success in the harsh and highly competitive world of e-commerce.

If you want to learn more about building online stores on Drupal or have any Drupal-related tasks, such as Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9 migration, the GetDevDone Drupal development team is always at your service. With over 15 years of web development and e-commerce experience, we know everything about this platform to call ourselves experts.

Talk to us about your project today. Your business success is our priority!