UberCart

If your website is being implemented using Drupal, then it will be worth considering the UberCart open source CMS. This module provides splendid E-commerce functionality to Drupal powered websites with an extended ease. Generally, UberCart is used to sell a varying variety of physical goods that includes shirts, shoes, bags, watches, and also digital goods like movies, music and even software and event ticketing.

UberCart is an open source e-commerce solution fully integrated with the leading open source content management system, Drupal, winner in two categories of the Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards. This is a killer combination for anyone looking to build a community around a product, sell access to premium content, offer paid file downloads, and much more, all while maintaining a seamless connection to your users. Ubercart leverages the advantages of Drupal’s major core and contributed systems, providing your users with shopping cart functionality that integrates with other parts of your company or community website. To learn more about the benefits of using Drupal, check out our article which answers the question, “Why use Drupal for e-commerce?” Developers can add to or alter Ubercart features to accommodate virtually any e-commerce need. This means you’ll never have to change the source code to add new features, so you’ll have an easy upgrade path as Ubercart continues to evolve to meet the demands of a growing community. To learn more, consider the following information pages:

• Screenshots (including store and administration pages)
• Currently integrated payment systems
• Current methods of calculating shipping
• More about testing

Ubercart in Action:

Our demo site, is a great place to test-drive the latest Ubercart release. Feel free to check it out and post your thoughts in our forums. The uberdemo showcases many of the features and strengths of Ubercart, while allowing you to play around as much as you like.

Current online stores are leveraging Ubercart to meet the following e-commerce needs:

• Selling physical goods from various sized product catalogs.
• Selling items in a virtual economy: Drupal.org showcase site, Digital Dollhouse
• Selling file downloads (i.e. music, videos, software).
• Selling event registrations: Drupal.org case study of Just Racing
• Selling site access for members only websites, including automatic renewals and expiration of user access.
• Selling items on multi-domain sites: Drupal.org case study of Row Eleven Wine Co.

Key Aspects:

• Built as a module package for the search engine friendly Drupal CMS, meaning you can fully integrate your store with the rest of your site or community.
• Ubercart can also be enhanced by the dozens of contributed Drupal modules and themes.
• Designed to be enhanced and modified. The core systems of Ubercart, including products, checkout, orders, payments, and order fulfillment are all designed to incorporate contributed modules. (In programming lingo, these systems are all extensible.) No hacking of code required to add functionality to your site! Just enable a module, configure the settings, and get to work.
• Strong desire for usability, reflected in testing, changing things, testing again, changing more things, and ultimately letting you customize how all the pieces fit together yourself. We believe the administrative interface can always be better, and we’re committed to enhancing it.
• Strong desire for flexibility, reflected in testing, changing things… you get the point. Every e-commerce site has a different set of needs, so we are constantly improving the core systems to make it easier for developers to meet those needs. (For those who know, we have mimicked Drupal’s hook system for the core systems of Ubercart. You can read more in the Developer’s Guide.)

Current Features:

• Configurable product catalogincludes catalog pages and a block to display product categories.
• Flexible product creation system.Create normal products by default. Add fields to store additional product information using Drupal’s CCK system.
• Flexible product attributes system.Create user selectable attributes for your products that modify the price, SKU/model, and/or weight of items as the customer adds them to his or her cart. Set default attribute/option sets for each product class to easily create many similar products.
• Single page checkout.All checkout information gathered on a single screen composed of configurable checkout panes. Third party modules can define checkout panes to replace or add to the default set, making it easy to customize the checkout experience.
• Automatic account generation (anonymous checkout).Accounts and emails are automatically generated based on the customer’s e-mail address. (Optional setting allows customers to specify account names and passwords in checkout.) For return customers, previously used addresses will be listed on the checkout page for easy access.
• Simple order processing.The order administration screens have been designed by and for our salesmen. We believe there is always room for improvement and will try to make it happen! Order screens use the “pane” model, so the screens are configurable and extensible to accommodate a wide variety of e-commerce applications.
• Simple order creation and editing.Easy to create orders manually for customers, adding products, shipping prices, etc. from a single screen. Line items system makes it easy to add fees, discounts, and coupons to orders.
• Integrated payment systemthat acts as a bridge between acceptable payment methods (check, credit card, cod, etc.) and payment gateways (Cyber Source, Authorize.net, PayPal, etc.). Configurable payment processing and tracking, and easy to use credit card terminal with varying levels of access.
• Activity logging.Enable logging to see all the changes made to an order, including payment processing. (Your accountant will love this!)
• XML import/exportallows you import products, attributes, orders, and customers from your old store into Ubercart or export products, attributes, orders, and customers from your Ubercart store