User preferences and user trends in the eCommerce space are constantly changing. But one thing that all customers want is a great user experience while shopping online. One way to enhance the user experience is by providing as much content as possible about the product, new trends, tutorials, product demos, customer reviews, etc. to the customer. For eCommerce stores and marketplaces, content is king, as it can significantly impact the conversion rates.

This is where other eCommerce platforms are struggling. Most of the eCommerce platforms always focused on improving and adding features to their Order Management System (OMS), Product Information Management (PIM), Omni-channel shopping, and other eCommerce features. Their focus was never on adding features for managing rich content which the customers need now. This new trend has the businesses looking for platforms not only having the ability to manage an eCommerce store but also which can manage the content and help improve the user experience for their customers. This is where Drupal and Drupal Commerce have a strong advantage over the other eCommerce platforms.

Why Drupal Commerce 2.x?

Content-Driven - Drupal Commerce’s biggest advantage is that it is built upon an enterprise CMS. This helps to create a seamless connection between the products and the content around it. This not only improves online sales, but also helps improve the offline sales as well through a rich user experience, optimized merchandising tools, and proven SEO tools.

- Drupal Commerce’s biggest advantage is that it is built upon an enterprise CMS. This helps to create a seamless connection between the products and the content around it. This not only improves online sales, but also helps improve the offline sales as well through a rich user experience, optimized merchandising tools, and proven SEO tools. Flexible - Drupal Commerce 2.x, just like Drupal 8 is highly configurable such that it can be customized as per the business needs of each business. Right from the checkout process, to the payment models, be it subscription, split payments, licensing, etc. can be easily developed. It is the most flexible eCommerce solution available.

- Drupal Commerce 2.x, just like Drupal 8 is highly configurable such that it can be customized as per the business needs of each business. Right from the checkout process, to the payment models, be it subscription, split payments, licensing, etc. can be easily developed. It is the most flexible eCommerce solution available. Easy to Use - Today eCommerce websites are more marketing driven by CMO’s as their owners. The administration panel and the customizable workflow are designed such that any non-technical person can operate it, make changes or test new ideas.

Open Source - Drupal Commerce is open source, which facilitates lower costs. The Drupal community along with the Commerce Guys, help maintain the high quality, innovation, faster speed, and the excellent security record of Drupal.

Extensible - Drupal Commerce can integrate with any third-party systems like ERPs, CRM, POS, Warehouse Management systems, etc. to provide a complete solution to a business with their existing systems. It can also easily integrate with most of the Drupal 8 modules needed to feature enhancement in the future.

What is new in Drupal Commerce 2.x?

Products : Product is now an entity instead of a node. We can create individual product variations using the inline entity. These variations can hold the SKUs and sets of attributes.

Product Attributes : In Drupal Commerce 2.x product attributes are its own entities, So it is easy to edit, delete, create new attribute from. Suppose you want to add the attributes to the product variation type, you have to edit the respective production variation type and select the checkbox under the ‘Attributes’. So it is easy to use a different form of modes to display fields.

Stores : Multiple stores in same Drupal Commerce Instance, hence there will be majorly two types of use cases, first one is where User can create their own stores based on their own products. Which means multiple carts from multiple stores, from the buyer’s perspective. The Second one is this, that the Company has billing location in multiple countries.

Currency Management : Integrated the Unicode CLDR project. So it is easy to use the currency inside and outside the US.

Price Formatting: Price format varies from country to country and language to Country. Like German(Austria) Vs German(Germany)

Taxes : Imports the tax rates automatically on country basis depending upon the product like B2B, B2C, digital or physical products.

Order and Line Item Types : This will provide the option to have separate order types for different types of products like physical and digital products, event registration, training payment etc. So it provides different checkout flow, different workflow, different logic to the customers.

Order Editing : Order is in step by step. Right columns provide the IP address and the geolocation of the order.

Add to Cart Forms : In the add to cart forms, we can have the line item fields and variation attributes fields as well. We now have full control of add to cart forms powered by Form display mode and field widget plugin.

Multiple Shopping Carts : If you having multiple shopping carts, the UI will help to see and check out each of them separately.

Shopping Cart block : Easily customizable shopping cart block.

Improved Checkout UX : It provides the option to do check out as a guest user, or can also be registered as a new user while doing the checkout. You can define your own custom checkout flows.

Payments : Under active development, Currently integrating Braintree and Authorize.Net as reference implementations.



Brands globally are looking at selling directly to the consumers but want to create content-rich shopping experience and similar businesses are looking for tools to better manage their content and user experience. Most businesses hence, prefer solutions which provide best of both worlds, great content management as well as all eCommerce features.

Hence, Drupal and Drupal Commerce fit the bill. The flexibility that we get when using these to develop any eCommerce architecture while being a content-driven website, provides a great shopping journey to all the customers. And in the end, all that matters is the Customer.

Examples of eCommerce sites built on Drupal using Drupal Commerce: