eCommerce

Recently I've undertaken researching various options for accepting credit card payments for Camp NeeKauNis, a non-profit organization I'm heavily involved in. We wanted to be able to accept donations and camp fees through our website, moving from mailed-in paper registrations and cheques to online registration and payment.

On the site side, CiviCRM provides us will all of the functionality we need - all that it needs is a payment processor. CiviCRM already supports a number of processors - PayPal, Google Checkout, Moneris, Authorize.net and more.

Ubercart, a Drupal module designed to add e-commerce to websites, is our de facto choice for adding such a feature. I've investigated the support for these payment processors out-of-the-bod - of course, you can always create your own module to support a new processor.

We recently upgraded the OctopusBooks.ca website from Drupal 4 to 5. In the process, we decided to upgrade the eCommerce module to the new Ubercart 1.0 shopping cart.  There are many flexible product and shipping options available in Ubercart and the whole shopping process is more slick and simple.

New blocks were added to take showcase the in-house and aggregated content that had been added to the website but was not being highlighted.  The blocks ranging from 'News' to 'Reviews' were randomized to give the site a fresh look each visit.

We decided to upgrade our websites from the ecommerce module to the new Ubercart 1.0 shopping cart.

Ubercart (http://www.ubercart.org) simplified the order taking process and has a very customizable checkout, shipping and tax settings.  We were even able to charge GST tax on shipping!  The one page checkout is great and calculated the shipping on the fly as you enter your shipping address.  It will even automatically create an account for you so you can view your order status or print an invoice (or download a file).

The e-commerce module for drupal allows custom plugins to handle shipping calculations. There are some complex plugins that allow querying of the US and Canadian Post offices for live rates based on the size and weight of packages, etc. etc.