Ubercart is an exciting open source e-commerce package that fully integrates your online store with Drupal. Ubercart leverages the advantages of Drupal's major core and contributed systems, providing your users with shopping cart functionality that integrates with other parts of your company or community website. It can be used to sell shippable goods, downloadable products, recurring memberships, and event tickets, and to enable complex interactions with Drupal through various add-on contributions.
This book guides you through the process of creating, administrating, and marketing an online store, providing information and tips for raising your sales and your customer support. It will also show you how to maintain and add advanced capabilities to your company's e-shop.
If you are a merchant wanting to invest your precious time to update the online presence of your company, or a website designer wanting to expand your business and offer innovative solutions to your clients, this book has been written for you. You don't need any programming experience to install and customize your electronic store. The procedure is well structured and easy and all we ask you to do is to follow some simple steps in order to complete some specific tasks in each chapter. The book will guide you through the installation and configuration of Drupal and Ubercart. From there it will cover specific areas like managing orders, customizing the frontend and customizing the user interface. At the end it covers the advanced topics of Internet marketing techniques and Search Engine Optimization.
When you reach the end of the book, you'll have a working store and you'll have obtained all the required knowledge to customize it to your specific needs.
Chapter 1, Getting Started, provides some basic definitions on Drupal and Ubercart. In addition, it sets the context of the online store case study that will be developed throughout the book.
Chapter 2, Installation of Drupal and Ubercart, is a quick installation reference for Drupal, the required Drupal modules, and Ubercart.
Chapter 3, Basic Configuration, helps you to understand the basic Drupal and Ubercart configuration.
Chapter 4, Managing Categories, Products, and Attributes, will show how to manage categories using the Drupal taxonomy, how to create new products or import them from external files, and how to use the attribute system of Ubercart.
Chapter 5, Managing Shipping and Packaging, helps the user to manage shipping and packaging in a flexible way. In this chapter you'll learn how to configure them.
Chapter 6, Managing Taxes and Payments, helps the user to manage taxes and payments in a flexible way. In this chapter you'll learn how to configure them.
Chapter 7, Managing Customers and Orders, is focused on CRM, reporting, and after-sales support.
Chapter 8, Customizing the Frontend, will show you how to install a new theme, customize a theme, or create a new theme from scratch.
Chapter 9, User Interface Enhancement Techniques, helps you to implement more complex marketing techniques.
Chapter 10, Optimizing and Promoting Your Store, will show you how to make an Ubercart store faster, more secure, and more search engine friendly.
Appendix A, Hotel Bookings System for Ubercart, shows how Ubercart can be used not only for selling products, but also for offering services as well.
Appendix B, Modules Used in the Book, lists the modules you can download when working through the exercises for each of the chapters.
Appendix C, Free and Commercial Ubercart Themes, gives you details of some very interesting free and commercial Ubercart themes.
Actually, you only need a computer to start working with this book. In Chapter 2 we'll show you how to install PHP, a database, and a web server, if they aren't already installed on your system. We'll also show you how to use a remote server and install you store there.
If you are a business owner wanting to create an e-commerce website for your company or to upgrade a company e-shop to be easier to maintain and have advanced e-shopping capabilities, then this book is meant for you. You don't need any programming experience to use this book.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "There is a possibility of facing an error message at this stage. It shows up when register_globals is enabled."
A block of code is set as follows:
<?phpphpinfo ();?>
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Go to Home | Administer | Store administration | Configuration | Tax rates and settings."
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