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Beginning Drupal 8

Todd Tomlinson - Beginning Drupal 8 (The Expert's Voice in Drupal) - 2015

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Chapter 22<br />

Building a Commerce Site<br />

In a relatively short 20 years, the concept of selling goods and services on the Internet has gone from a<br />

novelty to the mainstay of business. If you are a business and don’t provide an online channel to sell to your<br />

target customers, you are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to increase revenue, market share, and<br />

profitability. <strong>Drupal</strong> Commerce provides a robust and full-featured solution for building online storefronts,<br />

and in this chapter I’ll walk you through the process of creating a commerce site. To demonstrate the ease<br />

of building a commerce site on <strong>Drupal</strong>, I’ll create a site that is focused on selling <strong>Drupal</strong> T-shirts, coffee<br />

cups, and hats. The concepts can be expanded on to sell any physical or virtual goods, so you are welcome<br />

to either follow along and build the <strong>Drupal</strong> commerce site or use the example presented as a guide to create<br />

your own commerce site.<br />

Identifying Requirements for a Commerce Site<br />

As you’ve read several times in this book, the place to start with any website is to identify the requirements<br />

for the site.<br />

Requirements for the example commerce site presented in this chapter are common to many<br />

commerce sites and include<br />

1. The capability to display products for sale on the site.<br />

2. The capability to sell products that have specific attributes such as size.<br />

3. The capability for shoppers to put items into a shopping cart and manage that<br />

shopping cart.<br />

4. The capability for shoppers to check out and pay, including providing a credit<br />

card and selecting a shipping method.<br />

5. The capability for shoppers to visit the site and examine previous orders.<br />

With requirements in hand, we can then identify how we’re going to meet those requirements with <strong>Drupal</strong>.<br />

Using <strong>Drupal</strong> Commerce Kickstart as the distribution to build the storefront upon. Commerce Kickstart provides<br />

a preconfigured solution that meets many of the requirements right out of the box, including:<br />

• Product templates for creating and displaying products on the site, including<br />

products that have attributes such as size<br />

• A shopping cart the provides the capabilities for visitors to put items into a cart and<br />

manage those products through the shopping experience, including the checkout<br />

process with various payment methods and selecting the method to ship the<br />

products (physical goods)<br />

• Customer interface for reviewing previous orders<br />

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