New features and innovations in Drupal Commerce

Now that online shopping is ruling the day, the idea to create an online store looks lucrative like never before. For all those who want to build an e-commerce website with compelling digital experiences, there is a great option based on the Drupal CMS — Drupal Commerce. It is an open-source powerful e-commerce platform enabling developers to build online stores of any complexity.

The platform is at the forefront of e-commerce development and keeps getting new and exciting functionalities. Let’s now take a tour of the new features and innovations in Drupal Commerce.

Drupal Commerce 2: the key features of the platform

Drupal Commerce is a comprehensive solution for starting an online store. It is installable as an add-on module to the Drupal core and deeply integrated with the system. This means a DC website inherits the best Drupal core features — it uses the same coding standards and is API-first, mobile-first, potentially multilingual, editor-friendly, and much more.

DC’s main package, currently known as “Commerce Core,” includes the most necessary e-commerce features to get your store up and running. It is very flexible and designed with a framework set of mind that allows developers to think about what they can build with it.

In addition, there is a huge ecosystem of extra modules for Drupal Commerce, each of which further expands the standard functionalities (add integration with payment gateways, CRMs, live chats, five-star ratings, wishlists, invoicing, and much more).

Since DC is a solution for those who like to think outside of the box, it allows developers to implement absolutely any features through custom code where needed.

With the introduction of DC 2.0 in 2017, the platform’s architecture was successfully revamped. The new version takes care of just about everything in a store based on modern web development trends.

It allows you to publish products with ease, guides your shoppers through the checkout process, provides handy ways for you to track all your orders and payments, and much more. Here are at least the most important highlights of the features online stores can get with Drupal Commerce 2:

• Every shop is unique, and DC supports this diversity. It makes the shop’s specific details very easy to set up via the admin interface and adds smart ways of managing them. For example, you can choose your shop type, specify your currencies that can also be attached to languages, define your taxes for specific territories (European VAT, Canadian GST, Swiss VAT, or any other) that will be calculated automatically for your products by tax type plugins, and much more.
• E-commerce store owners and admins can seamlessly create product pages with customized attributes. Product variations (different colors, sizes, shapes, and so on) can be quickly added from the same page. Each product variation has a special SKU in the new version of the platform, which is very convenient in product management.
• It’s possible to set up different workflows for different order types. What information will be required or optional, how many steps are needed from buyers, whether you accept guest shopping or not, and much more — it’s only up to you to decide. It’s easy to create, view, manage, and process orders via a handy interface.
• You can connect your store to any payment gateway you prefer. There are community-contributed modules for the seamless integration with plenty of payment providers (Authorize.Net, PayPal, Square, Stripe, Vantiv, and many more). If your favorite is not on the list, no problem — it can be integrated with your website via custom code. The support for tokens makes credit card information useless for hackers. In addition to payment gateways, you can choose payment methods such as cash on delivery, card, bank transfer, check, etc.
• To make sure products are shipped to customers, it’s possible to integrate a store with shipping providers such as FedEx, UPS, USPS, Canada Post, Kiala, and actually any other. The main shipping functionalities will be performed by the Commerce Shipping module.
• Of course, promotions and coupons are an indispensable part of the marketing policies, and the updated platform provides you with handy interfaces for creating them as well as for configuring the pricing rules.

Latest innovations in Drupal Commerce

Drupal Commerce 2 continues moving forward, with its development team always abreast with the times. Here are at least some of the newest features and innovations that have come to DC recently.

Latest Drupal Commerce updates

With new releases, the DC team keeps improving the admin usability of the platform, adding new capabilities, fixing bugs, and making store management workflows smoother and faster.

The first half of 2021 has been especially full of new releases. Drupal Commerce 2.2.5 brought Drupal’s core Layout Builder integration and store administration improvements related to new payment entry options, coupon management, and combination offers. Drupal Commerce 2.7 introduced new features for address form configuration and stored payment methods. The platform’s team improved the processes of address entry, validation, and formatting, and currency localization, as well as providing faster product data entry thanks to the new product information management features.

Prior to that, the platform has been getting new features lately such as integration with the Drupal core Views, the ability to add product-specific tax rates, shopping cart expiration, exact start and end times for promotion based on the right time zone, and much more.

Updated demos by the creators

The Centarro team, formerly known as Commerce Guys, care about showcasing to everyone what their product, Drupal Commerce, can provide out of the box. They have created Commerce 2.x demo based on the default store theme Belgrade, filled it with demo content, and made it a multi-store and multi-domain shop where each subdomain shows off a different payment integration.

Decoupled Drupal Commerce

It has become possible — and now increasingly popular — to decouple Drupal Commerce. The decoupled, or headless approach means separating Drupal’s backend and frontend, while giving the frontend role to a third-party application (in many cases, one based on JavaScript, such are React, Vue, Gatsby, etc.) As a more flexible approach, so-called progressive decoupling is often preferred, which allows for the decoupling of only specific elements of the data presentation with Drupal’s original backend still in use.

The popularity of decoupled architecture has made it a topic of discussion at key Drupal events — for example, the speech “Decoupling Drupal commerce to multiply and scale the front end” or “The road to a headless Drupal Commerce future” by one of DC’s founders, Matt Glaman. To sum up, decoupled Drupal Commerce allows developers to scale e-commerce websites, create fast and reactive UIs for boosting sales, use multiple frontends with the same Drupal backend, and more.

Example of decoupled Drupal Commerce from Matt Glaman’s speech: a food delivery service that is a full-stack Drupal Commerce website with a React native based mobile app on Android and iOS fetching data from Drupal’s REST API:

Decoupled interactions are due to REST API and JSON in the Drupal core, as well as new modules designed specifically for decoupled shopping carts such as the Commerce Cart API and the Commerce Cart Flyout. Decoupled carts work fast and offer interactive features like cart flying out from the sidebar as users click on the cart icon, order details updatable without a page reload, products instantly previewable with changed attributes, push notifications available, and more.

Centarro Commerce

“The digital world is changing. Centarro is adapting Drupal Commerce to these changes, just like Drupal.” This intro to the new project is a very colorful description of the platform’s creators’ love for innovations. The new project is Centarro Commerce, a headless e-commerce platform powered by Drupal and the Commerce framework. It is packaged as Open SaaS. The project is meant for those who want to give decoupled DC a try.

Drupal 9 readiness

When the latest major Drupal core release (D9) came out in June 2020, Drupal Commerce 2 was compatible with it from day one. DC online stores can rely on the newest, most secure, and updated software both for the core and the e-commerce functionality.

Try the innovations in Drupal Commerce

New features in Drupal Commerce never stop arriving and they inspire new ideas for e-commerce stores. Would you like to make the best of them? You can rely on the industry experts that will help you get the latest DC advancements working on your website. Contact the Golems team!