The author over at Top Notch Themes recently put together a cool blog post where he talked about Ubercart and why you should use it for your ecommerce solution. I personally am using Ubercart for my own ecommerce sites as well as all of my clients. I think it’s a great cart system and because it is made for the Drupal CMS it’s even better. Here are the 7 reasons that Steph listed in the article:

1) Big names are using it

Prominent companies such as AOL and Warner Brothers Records has been using Ubercart for a while. More recently, Lullabot launched an Ubercart site for their conference registration.

2) Stable release for Drupal 5, significant progress on Drupal 6 version

Ubercart for Drupal 5 has been at a stable 1.x branch since the beginning of June. While it’s not yet stable, there is a dev version out for Drupal 6, and I know of at least one brave soul using it on a live site already. This is a testament to the active development community of Ubercart.

3) Ubercart is highly represented at Drupal events

There have been sessions on Ubercart at the last three Drupalcons, numerous local Drupal camps, FrOScon, etc. Ubercart even held their own Ubercamp this summer, for developers and interested parties to get together for a weekend of coding and planning.

4) Very active community

Dozens of new forum posts a day from its 3500 registered users, numerous code commits every week, and several community-contributed modules added or updated each week. The support time for issues and forum posts is very quick.

5) High visibility outside of the Drupalsphere

This is nearly unheard of for Drupal modules, but given Ubercart’s high visibility, it’s actually been a big draw for users coming into Drupal itself for the first time. They also recently had a mention in PC Magazine.

6) Full time developers with commercial backing

While the Drupal project itself has been proof that full time, funded developers aren’t needed to create a great product, in the world of e-commerce, it’s certainly helped. There are currently two (soon to be three) full time Ubercart developers, and an estimated dozen or so more from other organizations who also do only Ubercart development.

7) Focus on being user friendly

The Ubercart developers don’t want you to have to be a developer to set up an online store. There are a million settings and configuration possibilities for creating an online store, but they’ve put a strong focus on the UI, simple checkout, and intelligent defaults. This goes a long way in deploying a site right the first time, that looks great.

All these and many more are reasons that you should jump on the Ubercart bandwagon now if you have not already! An important thing to mention, especially for all the Joomla and Wordpress fanatics is that Ubercart is not some “plugin” like other CMS projects have for ecommerce. It’s clear that Ubercart is seperating itself as it’s own ecommerce platform entirely that integrates perfectly with the Drupal CMS

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Alright you’ve seen me write about Ubercart, the open source shopping cart for Drupal many times before. And I have been using Ubercart for various different projects with much success. But until recently, I never had the change in a project to use Ubercart with integration to an Authorize.net merchant account. I was very surprised how easy this was. Here is exactly what happened.

1) Since my client’s website was being hosted on Bluehost which also ranks in the top 3 for their ecommerce web hosting services reviewed and listed by web hosting search, I had my client purchase a secure certificate from Bluehost. Because he purchased it from Bluehost, their techs setup the SSL and did all the work without me having to do really anything.

2) Configured the Authorize.net API by providing Ubercart with my cient’s Authorize.net user id and password. To do this you need to activate the Authorize.net module and the Credit Card module.

3) Setup a directory outside of my docroot for my credit card encryption key to be stored. When setting up your Authorize.net module you will be notified to do this.

4) Went through all the Ubercart settings just to make sure that everything was setup exactly how I wanted it.

5) Downloaded and installed the Secure Pages module for Drupal. This module allows you to specify specific url’s within your site that you want to be under an HTTPS instead of just the regular HTTP.

6) Under the Secure Pages settings, I set the following url’s to be under an HTTPS with my newly setup Bluehost SSL…

user
user/*
user/*/edit
admin
admin/*
cart/checkout
cart/checkout/review
cart/checkout/payment_details/*
cart/checkout/complete

That’s It! Done! And Everything Works Great! That’s all I had to do and it worked perfectly. I have never had this quick of results when setting up an SSL  and hooking into the Authorize.net API. Despite the many shopping carts that claim how easy this is supposed to be, Ubercart provided in my own experience by far the easiest solution.

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“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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