Book Image

Getting Started with Drupal Commerce

By : Richard Jones
Book Image

Getting Started with Drupal Commerce

By: Richard Jones

Overview of this book

Drupal Commerce is emerging as the preferred option for open source e-commerce, and it also stands up to comparison against established proprietary systems. Getting Started with Drupal Commerce is an introductory guide to building an online store using Drupal Commerce in Drupal 7. Getting Started with Drupal Commerce takes you step-by-step through a complete e-commerce website build, from a clean installation of Drupal to a working example store. Starting with how to set up a Drupal development environment, we then discuss the planning of an e-commerce site and the typical questions you should be asking before getting started. Next, we walk through all of the essential setup required for most types of e-shop, including taxes, shipping, discounts and coupons, the checkout process, and backend order management. By the end of Getting Started with Drupal Commerce, you will be fully-equipped to plan and build your own store and you will understand the fundamental principles of Drupal Commerce that will enable you to progress to more complex store builds.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Getting Started with Drupal Commerce
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Planning our products


The majority of the products on the site are bags of coffee beans and tea leaves in various packaging formats.

Thus, we can fully define a sellable product with the following fields:

  • Title

  • Stock Keeping Unit

  • Description

  • Price

  • Image

  • Pack size

  • Physical weight

Product entities and product displays

One of biggest points of confusion for those new to Drupal Commerce is the concept of working with product entities and associated product displays.

I will now attempt to explain the reasoning behind this concept, and I will then introduce you to some extra helper modules that make life significantly easier when it comes to working with the model.

With a base Commerce installation, when you create your products, you do not actually have an automatic way to display them on the website which initially seems rather strange.

The reason is that sellable products are actually examples (instances, if you will), of specialized product entities as provided by the Commerce product module, and as such...