Drupal and ECommerce

Drupal provides e-commerce modules to enable you to sell products and services online.

Basic Setup

• All orders stored in MySQL database
• Customer can choose between account registration and express checkout
• Customisable email notifications
• “Send to a Friend”
• Printable pages
• Edit product in basket
• Unlimited number of products
• Unlimited number of categories
• Products can be assigned to multiple categories
• What’s Hot
• Related products
• Advanced search facility by Product Price and Type
   

Promotion and Administration

• Discount coupons
• Payment through PayPal/SagePay/WorldPay etc
• Prices shown in Pounds Sterling
• VAT inclusive display; separated at checkout
• Shipping rates calculated on delivery zone and weight
• Customer Accounts
• Username and password controlled
• Password reminder
• All data stored in database
   

Ecommerce – some first thoughts…

You’ll need a Merchant Bank account to deposit your online income, you can get this from an acquiring bank (most of the UK and Ireland banks have this facility).

Alternatively if you are going to use PayPal you will need set up a Website Payments account.

You’ll need to find a good payment services provider (PSP), such as Sage Pay or PayPal, that takes care of fraud screening, card compliance (PCI DSS), payment authorisation and settlement of funds into your merchant account.

All online merchants must now be PCI DSS compliant which ensures that you take online fraud seriously. As an online merchant you have a responsibility to your customers to make sure that their card details are not compromised in any way. Part of this involves high security measures for the server which takes and stores credit card details. For this reason we no longer recommend that clients use their own server to take payment.

Instead, we recommend they use a Form Payment system, such as that supplied by Sage Pay or PayPal where customers’ credit card details are exclusively taken on those companies’ servers which means you are not responsible for the server compliance.
If you find this confusing, please do ask us and we will endeavour to explain it! All it practically means to you is that when customers come to pay they will be redirected to Sage/PayPal to enter the card details. Once made, they are then automatically returned to a thank you page on your website.