“I need a simple shopping cart” is a simple yet complicated demand that hear often from many of my clients. “Simple, just need to be able to sell a couple of products on my website.” If only they knew how difficult such a “simple” thing can be. What to do? Setup Zencart? OS Commerce? Just build my own from scratch? Having just a simple shopping cart can be quite the task for a developer when a business has such a demand, yet such a small budget. I have been battling this dilemma for over 2 years now.
A good place to start is with a content management system, then find a way for a small shopping cart plugin to integrate into it. That way it’s not a big cart system like Zencart, and it’s still content manageable unlike the custom one you might be considering building. But two of the most popular CMS systems don’t have great shopping cart plugins that fully integrate with the CMS system itself. Joomla and Wordpress! Sure there are many plugins available, but not any that truly integrate with the CMS itslef.
That’s where Drupal CMS has the advantage. With the Ubercart plugin for Drupal, you get a simple shopping cart setup that integrates perfectly with your drupal CMS system. I have found this to work perfectly for me. Using the drupal “node” system, you can create a specefic node for each individual product. This allows you to setup a smaller number of products, and get the huge SEO benefits that come from the Drupal system. Things like URL Aliases and so forth. Now, because of Drupal you can have a CMS, blog, newsletter, shopping cart, and much much more all integrated seamlessly into the same site. I can tell you from personal experience that Joomla and Wordpress do not come close to providing this integrated combination as well as Drupal.
And for you developers out there, the drupal template system is way better than Zen Cart and OS Commerce combined. The admin interface is easier to learn. And you can create individual product pages, create a product catalog, or do both. You are not tied to one, unlike Zen Cart and the other major e-commerce systems. So the next time you are in need of a simple shopping cart solution, try giving Drupal a try along with the drupal Ubercart plugin. It won’t let you down.
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Thanks a lot for the praise! We’ve got plenty of work to do yet but are glad that folks have been able to use Ubercart with good success for some time now. Hoping our projects help you improve your e-commerce business… : )
Great Article! Dows anyone knows how stabile übercart runs? i need to install a shopsystem with near 2.000 articles and just want to know if übercart is the right choice.
I’ve always been more inclined to use a cart system like Zen Cart when there are thousands of products. I’ve used Ubercart with Drupal when I need a more “simple” shopping cart with a lower number of products. Just my preference though. In this situation Ubercart has worked great for me.
Regarding sites with large product catalogs, there are folks who have done this (books, clothing), but we’re still fleshing out the bulk product administration tools. Lyle should be committing a bulk product edit form soon, but you’ll simply have to use Drupal’s standard page administration capabilities in the meantime. These aren’t optimal for managing large amounts of pages at a glance if you’re going to need to do that any time soon. On the contrary, the product and catalog import tools are quite well developed and have allowed others in the past to import similarly sized product catalogs.
for a very inexpensive, reliable, no install or update solution for 2,000 products or more or less, see Blue Oryx Internet Solutions. Paypal, Authorizenet ready w/ blog/news module and more. The Simple Shopping Cart. you will not be disappointed. blueoryx.com
Hi,
I am ready to give it a try!!
Would be great if working ok!
Bas
Webmaster Motortassen
thank you for your info.
Excellent article! Does anyone knows how stable übercart runs? i need to install a shop system with near 2.000 articles and just want to know if übercart is the right choice.
I have been looking at drupal lately for some clients and it’s nice to know there is what appears to be a very popular cart system. Thanks for the post!
hi ,its not define how to install pay pal with drupal please give me solotion ………
Ubercart is your solution. http://ubercart.org
That is cool. Thanks, Kellie shoptheemall.com Ft Wayne, IN
We have been considering a move to Drupal recently and Ubercart looks very promising to us.
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The latest trend for shopping online is to use a portal, which would serve as an entrance to minor and major stores online.
I think this has just swung the votes for Drupal. I was looking at different frameworks and CMSes which I can customize for building a community site, as well raising some funds. And it looks like Drupal (which I can extend easily) and Ubercart are definitely the best way to launch everything in double quick time!
Let’s get this going then. First to download ubercart and plug it into the Drupal that I downloaded via Bitnami’s Drupal stack, then confirm that it works before I plug it into my own server which is currently still using Dynamic DNS, since it is sitting behind a dial in broadband network, without the luxury of a fixed IP yet.
Well, raise some funds first, then that will pay for a proper data centre few Us of space. And maybe then be able to afford the sexy XServe? Haha, I’ll probably settle for Ubuntu Server sitting on Dell, for the sake of keeping costs low. Just need constant monitoring and many fail safes, maybe via Heartbeat and DRBD. We shall see. Let’s rock and roll!
I have a shopping site and want to try your method. Thanks for sharing.
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.
has anybody here had success recently with Ubercart?
Thanks for your information. I will give it a try.
Maybe it’s better now, but around a year ago, I was considering developing a CMS using Drupal, and one of the customer’s requirements was to be able to have a product database with a shopping cart. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any plugins that were compatible with the lastest version of Drupal, and the code in Drupal is so bulky, it quickly became a pain to add my own cart to it. I ended up using the much slimmer Website Baker CMS and a free PHP script shopping cart, manually integrating it.
The next time I need to add a cart to a CMS, I’m going to use OpenCart, though. That seems like one of the best new carts out there.