Drupal Commerce 2.x features for your great Drupal 8 online store

Online stores opens unlimited opportunities with no geographical boundaries.

Behind their lines of code are successful purchases, great profits, and happy customers. So online stores should be reliable, efficient, and attractive in everything — from product catalog to e-commerce checkout. An awesome choice for building an online store is Drupal 8, particularly with one of its greatest treasures — Drupal Commerce 2.x. Let’s explore Drupal Commerce 2.x features for your Drupal 8 online store in more detail.

Why choose Drupal 8 for e-commerce websites?

Before we move on to describing the features of Drupal Commerce 2.x, we will start with mentioning at least a couple of Drupal 8 characteristics that form a great support for your Drupal 8 e-commerce website.

• Content + e-commerce = more conversions. Drupal is a powerful content management system, which means you are getting more than just an online store. You will have a website full of diverse content types to support your store with good content. The approach of content-driven commerce is a sure way to get engaged customers, better SEO, and increased conversions.
• Mobile responsiveness. Since mobile sales are headed to overtake desktop sales soon, it is awesome that Drupal 8 is mobile responsive out-of-box. Drupal 8 has everything you need to make any theme responsive, so its elements magically adjust to mobile device screens. Let your mobile users shop with pleasure!
• ​​​​​​Better performance. Loading speed is especially important for online stores. Users want to browse your website, compare various products, and place orders without delay. Drupal 8 has powerful caching techniques for faster loading. One of them is the innovative BigPipe, which lets you serve static website elements to users instantly and load dynamic ones next.
• ​​​​​​Third-party integration. An e-commerce website usually relies on third-party services for payments, marketing analytics, online customer support, CRMs, and so on. Drupal 8 has built-in web services that make integrations incredibly smooth.
• Multi-language. Customers are more willing to buy when they see information in their native language. Drupal 8 has awesome multi-language support. It is very easy to add languages to websites and translate exactly what you need. Interface translations are ready for a hundred languages.

Drupal Commerce 2.x for your Drupal 8 online store

Drupal Commerce is a solution for creating e-commerce sites from scratch or adding e-commerce features of any complexity to existing sites. It is free and open-source, like any other contributed Drupal module. However, it works like a full-fledged e-commerce framework that covers all the needs of an online store: product catalog, cart, checkout, shipping, orders, and so on.

Drupal Commerce 2 is the version for Drupal 8, and it has recently issued a new update — Drupal Commerce 2.10, which shows great advancements in product administration, third-party integration, and more.

There is also an ocean of add-on free contributed modules the extend Drupal Commerce 2.x features endlessly. However, Drupal Commerce 2.x out-of-box comes with an impressive pack of submodules that show its comprehensive capabilities:

 

So let’s see what your online store can enjoy!

Why use Drupal Commerce 2.x for your online store

• Single or multi-stores available

One of the awesome Drupal Commerce 2.x features is that, instead of having one store, you can use multiple stores in Drupal 8. Each of them can have its own product types, currencies, taxes, contact information, cart, checkout, and everything else.

• Smart support for multiple currencies 

Drupal 8 lets you add multiple currencies out of the list, as well as custom ones by providing the currency code.

Here, the true multilingual soul of Drupal 8 shows perfectly! Drupal Commerce 2.x takes into account the names of each currency in each language, their formatting, and other important details.

This extensive information is provided by the commerceguys/intl library. It works in accordance with the internationally recognized CLDR standard.

• Awesome product handling 

Your Drupal 8 online store can have whatever products you wish — from simple ones to products with attributes. Each unique combination of attributes is a product variation in Drupal Commerce 2.x, and it has its own SKU, or machine-readable ID. This is very convenient for managing your orders and stocks.

Thanks to the Fancy Attributes module now included out-of-box, creative selectors like color swatch are available for product attributes. Multilingual products are also easy to set up.

• 70+ payment gateways & flexible payments features

Customers are more likely to buy when they have their preferred payment gateways. One of the great Drupal Commerce 2.x features is the support for 70+ payment gateways! Authorize.Net, Braintree, PayPal, Square, Stripe, Vantiv are just the beginning of the list. There are add-on contributed modules for any provider you wish. Custom modules can be created for all others.

The flexibility in payment types is also awesome:

1. On-site payment gateways let customers enter credit card details directly on your site, and tokenization can be applied for data protection.
2. Off-site (redirect) gateways redirect customers to the third-party payment service and back to your site upon successfully completing the operation.
3. Off-site (iframe) gateways do not redirect customers to the third-party service and handle the checkout process in an embedded frame.
4. There is also a built-in “Manual” gateway option for such payment methods as Cash on Delivery, Card on Delivery, Cheque, Bank Transfer, and so on. They are marked as pending payments and are moved to complete by your store admin.
5. It is also possible to set up an IPN (Instant Payment Notification) service and be instantly notified about events related to PayPal transactions.

Your Drupal 8 online store will have handy interfaces that let you authorize, void, or refund the payments.

• Flexible promotions and discounts

Engage your customers with promotions! Your Drupal 8 online store will offer you a number of built-in offer types for fixed or percentage amounts. This can work in accordance with conditions that you set.

• Smart handling for taxes

There is no need to bother about specifying the product price with taxes. Drupal 8 can automatically calculate the taxes for you. It has predefined taxes for countries, as well as letting every merchant choose special taxes. The system knows taxing specifics, for example, the difference in VAT calculation for physical and digital products in the EU.

• Multiple order types

Your Drupal 8 onlines store can have not one but multiple orders types with special workflows for each. This allows for creating fine-tuned experiences for various product types. For example, selling tickets will need a different workflow than selling T-shirts. Order receipt emails are also very customizable.

• Flexible checkout options

Checkouts are incredibly handy. They offer progress indication bars, the ability for users to checkout as a returning customer and reuse the previously entered information, the option for you to allow or not guest checkout, and so on.

Moreover, there can be different checkout flows for different product types. They may vary in the number of steps to take, which customer information to require, and so on.

• Great shipping options

With Drupal Commerce 2.x. you can configure the shipping methods, define which products are shippable, and manage the shipments.

The basic features are handled by an add-on module called Commerce Shipping. It lets you set up such shipping methods as flat rate-per-order and flat rate-per-item.

For more specific and advanced shipping integrations, there is a plugin-based system. There are existing plugins for famous shippers, and developers can create any other for you — whatever your favorite shipper is. It is also possible to provide shipping rates based on conditions.

Create an online store with Commerce 2.x on Drupal 8

This has been just a brief overview of Drupal Commerce 2.x features. This box of treasures can offer much more in good hands. In addition, customization miracles can fine-tune your e-commerce website in every detail to your liking.

Entrust your Drupal 8 e-commerce website to our Drupal development team. Our guys have a lot of experience with e-commerce and know how to use the benefits of Drupal Commerce 2.x in the best ways for you.