You would think that since women just love the idea of shopping, they might be the ones ruling the online shopping world. But surprisingly, men are catching up quick. According to statistics, in the US there are about 68% men and 72% women online shoppers, the latter acing by a mere 4%! The online shopping industry has considerably grown over the years and now has become a multi-billion dollar revenue stream. A successful eCommerce store should not only be able to deliver superior quality products but also provide a compelling user experience. Smooth transitions, from the time the user looks at a product till they complete the payment of their order, will not only keep the users satisfied but also coming back for more.
The two core and most vital organs of an eCommerce store are Shopping carts and Payment gateways without which online shopping is like a stapler without staples. Drupal offers various integrations with different shopping carts and payment gateways and works beautifully together to provide seamless transitions throughout the shopping experience of your Drupal eCommerce website.
Shopping Carts
Studies show that about 65% of shopping carts are abandoned just before completing a transaction for various reasons. Like, high shipping rates, a long checkout process, slow load time, complex looking cart, etc. A good user experience will keep an eCommerce store from losing sales to an extent at least. Drupal has a range of simple, flexible and user-friendly shopping cart modules (Basic Cart, Light Shop) and also integrations with third party open-source eCommerce solutions like Drupal Commerce and UberCart.
Payment Gateways
Payment gateways are services that allows and authorizes payments (credit card, debit cards, e-wallets, net-banking, etc.) and processes them securely such that the payment heads straight to the merchant’s account. Payment integration with Drupal Commerce, which is an open-source eCommerce solution, come in two types:
a) On-site – In this method, third party APIs and web services help in processing the payment with the customer’s credit/debit credentials collected from the check-out form.
b) Off-site – Here, the customer is redirected to a payment gateway which processes the payment by sending the details to the customer’s bank and getting it back to the merchant’s account.
Drupal Commerce is an enterprise level e-commerce solution which is loaded with features but sometimes a simple solution that just does the job is required. Drupal’s Payment module provides an easy and compact payment platform that allow other modules using the payments module to carry out any payment. It supports many payment gateways like PayPal, iDEAL, Stripe, Ogone, etc. Once the payment has been made, you can see a summary of your payments in your Drupal website. Also available in Drupal is the Payment Gateway API which is a pluggable module that provide an API for accepting payments on the Drupal website. It provides access to various payment gateways like WebMoney, RoboXchange, PayPal, 2Checkout, etc.
You will find umpteen payment gateways that integrates with your Drupal ecommerce store with the help of API’s and/or web services. You can even have more than one payment gateway attached to your Drupal e-store so that when one is down or too slow, you can easily switch to the other.
