Drupal and Ubercart: A Perfect Pairing for E-Commerce Perfection
Interested in becoming an international development practitioner? The Center for Development Excellence (CDE) is the place for you to start. With 40 years of practical experience in donor project implementation and capacity building, the CDE provides workshops, seminars, and certification programs for development practitioners around the world.
Background
The CDE wanted to make it easier for its international audiences to browse and purchase trainings, as well as review past order history and stay connected with the organization's happenings. It also wanted to automate many of its traditionally redundant and manual processes (especially those surrounding customer registration and payment processing).
To accomplish these objectives, the CDE needed to move away from its static website to a more robust content management and e-commerce system. Unfortunately, this undertaking carried some inherent challenges because of the nature of the CDE’s primary audiences. Many of its customers access the website from remote, low bandwidth areas across the world. They also have inconsistent access to internet in the field.
To meet many of the CDE's unique challenges and needs, especially in helping to grow the first-generation website into a thriving online community for international development practitioners, Forum One proposed using a combination of Drupal and Ubercart.
What is Ubercart?
Ubercart is an open-source, web-based, e-commerce store management system available as a plug-in module for the Drupal CMS. In other words, it is a shopping cart that fully integrates with your Drupal installation.
Ubercart’s features include:
- Transparent integration with the Drupal core resulting in advanced reporting, community building, and user administration features.
- Activity logging and auditing enabling the store manager to follow all stages of payment processes and all changes made to an order.
- Configurable product catalog allowing products to be categorized and cataloged to make finding products quicker.
- Flexible product and product attribute creation system enabling administrators to modify a product’s selectable attributes (including price, international rates, shipping costs, SKU numbers, etc.).
- Multiple modules for discounting which provide flexibility and variety in selecting and configuring a discounting model for your products and services.
- Multiple checkout payment method options allowing customers the ability to pay for order items via credit card, check, or money order payment methods.
- Automatic account generation – rather than forcing a user to register before making a purchase, Ubercart streamlines the process by automatically creating an account for any individual that makes a purchase. This system also allows a single user to make a purchase, such as a training registration, on behalf of another individual or even multiple individuals. In this scenario too, the system automatically generates an account for the registrant/s. This was especially important for CDE, as a single individual (the initiator) is often responsible for selecting and purchasing courses on behalf of other individuals (the registrant/s) even though the initiator does not want to actually participate in the course/s in question. This makes it easy for users that don’t have daily access to the internet to register and receive information about their trainings or courses.
- Integrated payment system allowing integration between various payment methods and gateways including Authorize.net, PayPal, Google Checkout, and others.
- Integration with CiviCRM and other customer relationship management systems. This enables an organization to maintain all its comprehensive relationship management information in a single database and provides visibility across the data into trends and customer history.
These features, combined with the slue of other features offered by Ubercart and the Drupal CMS, provided a robust solution for meeting the CDE's multi-faceted needs. Project Outcomes
The new site enhances the CDE staff’s ability to post, edit, and manage web content, specifically for courses, trainings, certificate programs, resources, and products. It also boosts the CDE’s ability to collect orders and process registrations and payments (including those made by initiators on behalf of other parties). Finally, it provides an initial framework that sets the stage for future success, allowing the CDE to start with a fully-functioning e-commerce website, and to grow the site out into a full-fledged online community in future phases.
This new website will enable the CDE to better serve its customers, streamline the processes surrounding registration and payment, and provide greater visibility into the ordering patterns of its customers. The online community features, set for the next phase of the website, will also enable the CDE to add value beyond the classroom, providing a mechanism for practitioners to share best practices, lessons learned, and resources.
We are very excited about the launch of this new site and look forward to using Ubercart and Drupal to serve more of our customers in the future.
Credits: Colleen Gray, project manager for the CDE website launch, contributed to this blog post.
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