Prăvălia de acasă, An Online Store Built on Drupal Commerce

pravaliadeacasa.ro is a special kind of store, since the purpose of this eCommerce website is to make authentic Romanian products easily accessible both to Romanians living abroad and to foreigners on a search to discover Romania through its finest products, it was a perfect fit to try the new Drupal Commerce.

Drupal Ubercart vs. Drupal Commerce

So where to start when implementing an online store? Technically speaking, it wasn’t hard to decide on using the Drupal framework for this online shop implementation. Although our previous experience with Drupal Ubercart was a great one, we decided it was time to try the new and improved Drupal Commerce module and build this project on it. While doing so, we also got the chance to differentiate between the two modules.

We found Drupal Commerce to be far more developer-friendly and extensible than Ubercart, most of its modules are still in an early stage of development and thus still need to be improved functionality-wise. In its defense, Ubercart is packed with out-of-the-box features, which combined with a intuitive interface adds to the module’s overall flexibility. In the end it’s up to the development team to take its pick, and in our case the project’s specs tipped the balance towards using Drupal Commerce thanks to its tax calculation, VAT support and discount pricing rules.

Drupal Shipping Rates Calculator

Having built the website structure using Drupal, we then moved on to implementing the online shop and started with the pricing function that needed to work flawlessly for a shop that ships its goods all over the world. This task had two major challenges.

The first was to integrate rates for various shipment service providers pravaliadeacasa.ro operates through. A custom Drupal rate calculator module had to be written from scratch for each shipment service provider taking into account its rates and types of shipment services. Of course, these rate calculators also had to be configured for those shipment companies which offered more than one type of shipment services.

The second was to implement valid VAT standards for different types of products and for different categories of clients. Some products available in the online store have a different VAT rate – books are one example. Also, VAT doesn’t apply to legal entities within the EU, such as client companies – a detail we decided to tackle in the registration phase based on the VAT identification number (VATIN).

Before moving on to the pricing set-up for the online store, we had one additional detail to take into account: shipment services can’t transport specific products in some countries due to special restrictions – one such example is shipping alcohol in Sweden. An address-based validation was implemented to display only products available to users based on the location provided in the contact info section for their accounts.

Drupal Payment Gateway Integration

Having fulfilled all these requirements, we then finally implemented the payment system which currently supports online PayPal payments and will soon include the Romanian provider RomCard. Payment on delivery is of course available for orders placed from Romania, while bank transfer payment is available for locations worldwide.

Drupal Shop Features

Moving on to other website functionalities, we implemented a highly descriptive interface for product pages which provides both relevant information related to the product on display, as well as means for users to interact with the online store. Product pages contain a product description, a set of product details, stock availability, descriptive tags associated to each product, and last but not least, a list of similar recommended products. These pages also allow visitors to rate products and add their reviews without them needing to login. However, those who do register and login will find that the shopping experience is a smooth and efficient one.

Drupal Shop Hosting

One last detail we should add is we also provide hosting services for pravaliadecasa.ro which include the per se hosting of the Drupal application, unlimited bandwidth, automatic daily back-up for the website, as well as maintenance and updates. In other words, it covers pretty much everything needed for the online store to be up and running to its full potential 24/7.

Get in touch

Looking back on things, we can’t help noticing how the experience of previous Drupal projects we implemented shaped our approach towards this particular online store, resulting into a project executed “by the book”. If you have an online shop you’d like to implement and you think we did a good job, don’t hesitate to drop us a line and tell us more about your ideas.