Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce: Walk through the creation of an online store with Drupal's e-Commerce module (From Technologies to Solutions) (Paperback)

by Michael Peacock (Author)
Key Phrases: shippable product, login security, auction item, Doug's Dinos, Michael Peacock, Securing Deploying (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

In Detail

Drupal is a free and open-source modular web application framework and content management system (CMS) written in PHP that can run in many environments, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. Drupal e-Commerce is a free, open-source, feature-rich, flexible package of modules that seamlessly adds full e-Store capabilities to Drupal.

Drupal e-Commerce is the combination of Drupal, the award-winning Drupal 5 content management system, and the e-Commerce package of modules that can be plugged into it, bringing a wealth of e-commerce functionality to the software.

In this book you will learn how to use the Drupal content management system along with its e-Commerce modules to set up and manage an online shop. We will install the software, have a look at its features, plan our shop, create our shop, look at customer management, create a design for our shop, and cover security, taxes, shipping, and even marketing our business!

If you're new to Drupal and want to set up a powerful e-commerce system, this book is for you. If you've some experience of working with Drupal and want to understand how its e-commerce options can be used to power an online shop, this book will also prove invaluable.

What you will learn from this book?

• Why to choose Drupal for e-commerce
• Installing and configuring Drupal and its e-Commerce module
• How Drupal and its e-Commerce module work
• Creating and managing content
• Creating and managing user accounts, roles, and permissions
• Things to think about when planning to sell online
• Structuring your site, your product catalogue, and framing a shopping process for users
• Framing business policies to handle legal and professional issues
• Branding your site by customizing default themes
• Installing new themes and creating a custom theme
• Customizing the checkout process for processing orders
• Creating a better selling experience
• Attracting customers with discounts, coupons, auctions, donations, flexicharges
• Working with taxes and shipping rules in Drupal e-Commerce
• Drupal e-Commerce's shipping API modules
• Securing and maintaining your site (deploy, backup, restore)
• Creating and managing invoices using the Invoices module
• Integrating CiviCRM to manage appointments and log phone calls
• Improving traffic with Search Engine Optimization
• Advertising programmes, newsletters, and viral marketing campaigns

Approach

The book starts with the basics of Drupal and then steps you through the creation of an online shop, exploring Drupal further as needed. Only the features of Drupal relevant to the e-commerce application will be covered.

Written in a straightforward, easy-to-understand manner, the book provides the essentials of getting your e-commerce website up and running with Drupal.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for people who want to start selling online as quickly as possible, and want to see how to use the proven Drupal platform to achieve this.

The book is ideal for use in a small business with only basic in-house technical skills. It will also be useful for developers who not only want to create an e-commerce site, but also want a CMS platform for expanding the site in the future. No prior knowledge of Drupal is required. No PHP experience is expected, although it will be useful. Basic knowledge of e-commerce will also be useful, although the main concepts are introduced and covered as required.

About the Author
Michael Peacock

Michael Peacock is a web developer from Newcastle, UK and has a degree in Software Engineering from the University of Durham. After meeting his business partner at Durham, he co-founded Peacock Carter, a Newcastle based creative consultancy specializing in web design, web development and corporate identity.

Michael loves working on web related projects. When he is not working on client projects, he is often tinkering with a web app of his own.

He has been involved with a number of books, having written two books himself (and working on his third): Selling online with Drupal e-Commerce Packt, and Building websites with TYPO3 Packt. He has also done technical reviews of two other books: Mobile Web Development Packt, and Drupal Education & E-Learning Packt.

You can follow Michael on Twitter.

Michael Peacock

Michael Peacock is a web developer from Newcastle, UK and has a degree in Software Engineering from the University of Durham. After meeting his business partner at Durham, he co-founded Peacock Carter, a Newcastle based creative consultancy specializing in web design, web development and corporate identity.

Michael loves working on web related projects. When he is not working on client projects, he is often tinkering with a web app of his own.

He has been involved with a number of books, having written two books himself (and working on his third): Selling online with Drupal e-Commerce Packt, and Building websites with TYPO3 Packt. He has also done technical reviews of two other books: Mobile Web Development Packt, and Drupal Education & E-Learning Packt.

You can follow Michael on Twitter.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (April 3, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847194060
• ISBN-13: 978-1847194060
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #337,437 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Introduction, July 7, 2008

By	David B. Harvey "todapeople" (Lakeland, FL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Technology books are generally expected to be on the shelves shortly after major releases of a particular software and therefore do not receive the most thorough editing possible. They're also quite expensive considering they have a relatively short shelf life because they're only really in demand until the new version of the software is released. Given that this book delivers on both counts and exhaustively details the cheesy example of Doug's Dino store, it's still a worthy read.

Well, it won't do you much good to simply read it. This book steps the reader through the process of setting up a website to sell goods and/or services over the internet. The book tells the story of a web-developer/designer(you) that contracts with the owner of a physical store to set up a website to sell his products and services on-line.

In the first chapter, the author explains how to install Drupal 5.x and the e-Commerce module, the most recent versions of this e-business duo. If you are interested in Ubercart, e-Commerce's other Drupal competitor, you're reading the wrong book. Micheal does a fair job of pointing out the pitfalls of downloading and installing the software. I wished he had directed the reader to download all the modules that would be needed for later chapters even if they wouldn't be installed until later. There is no one place in the book you can find a list of all the modules you will need for a particular store implementation.

In the next couple of chapters, the author explains the basics of Drupal and planning the store including even legal requirements. In my experience, these chapters and the chapter on theming were really lacking. My experience with customers suggests that they usually want to start with how the site will look. Granted this book isn't about theming, but even considering that, the look and feel topics are really sparse. Customers relate their online experience to how they want their physical store to look. All this form following function jargon is something for the developer and designer to juggle, the owner wants pretty first. Another problem I have with these chapters relates to the decision not to use CCK and the image field to display the products in the catalog. Although he suggests later that it might be a good idea to use CCK, it seems that a product catalog might be a perfect application of this popular module, and would ease the administration of a dynamic e-store.

The chapter about users, roles, and permissions is a must. This chapter alone will save countless hours of head scratching, and could single-handedly save the book. Many of the ways that users, roles, and permissions and creative uses of the taxonomy module can be implemented will allow the user to use, create, and sell almost limitless types of products and services.

The next chapters direct the reader in set up the shopping cart and checkout functionality, including detailed explanations of taxes, shipping, and payment gateways. I would like to have learned more about secure checkout, and security in general, it seems like a pretty important topic to a store owner and his customers. A small section of one chapter was spent on the CiviCRM module, it should have been skipped or covered in much greater detail. In the last chapter on Marketing Your Business, the author provides an extensive list of ways to market one's business, but doesn't describe how Drupal could be used to automate the process, or even recommended other products for the job. I bet there are a number of things that Drupal can do to help promote one's business.

Bottom line: Selling online with Drupal e-Commerce is a great introduction to the process of setting up a Drupal website for an internet based business. The author does a great job pointing out places where your intuition can get you into trouble, and points you in the right direction to modules not included in be basic Drupal: e-Commerce installation, but if you are new to selling, period; require a knock-out store design, or need help advertising your site, you are going to need a few more books. To it's credit, it's not a book simply about Drupal, but leads the reader through the whole process and discusses all the processes and services a store-owner will need to set up his store. I can't give it a big thumbs up, but a worthy read none-the-less.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book that works!, June 15, 2008

By	Chris Hobbs "Asterisk Enthusiast" (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have read many books about using particular software applications. Almost always the instructions given are incomplete or don't work without some technical work on the part of the reader. Normally the author of the book hasn't paid enough attention to the state already stored on his or her computer and, when a reader follows the written instructions, all sorts of peculiar little problems arise: file not found, environment variable not set, etc.

I worked through this book from cover to cover and, put simply, it was correct. Everything it said worked first time.

I installed Drupal and eCommerce on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and simply followed the instructions in this book. Within an hour I had an eCommerce website up and running.

I strongly recommend this book (and the underlying Drupal and eCommerce packages) to anyone setting up an eCommerce web site for a small or medium business.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Raunchywear loves Drupal, July 23, 2008

By	Raunchywear Swimwear and Lingerie "Raunchywea... (Adelaide, Australia) - See all my reviews

Drupals' ecommerce offering is now very competitive with Mambo and Virtuemart. This book is an excellent tutorial for those wanting to use Drupal as an ecommerce solution. What we particularly like at Raunchywear Swimwear and Lingerie is the apparel specific focus of Drupal.

This book is well laid out and even includes hints and tips about connecting Drupal with CRM and marketing options.

Well worth the read for anyone considering an ecommerce site using open source solutions.

It's also crammed into only 245 pages.