Drupal 7 + Drupal Commerce

Recently, I had an opportunity to build an E-Commerce Website.  After reviewing different platforms, I choose Drupal.  Being unaware on excatly how new Drupal 7 was, I charged ahead with the project.  Not long after I started this adventure I realized just how new Drupal 7 was.  This version of Drupal was released February 2011 and many modules hadn’t been converted over from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7.

I located a local Twin Cities Drupal + Ubercart/Commerce group that meet monthly.  I started attending these meetings and learned as much as I could about using Drupal and an e-commerce module.  After experimenting with both Ubercart and Drupal Commerce for Drupal 7, I decided to use Drupal Commerce to complete my project.  Drupal Commerce offered more documentation to use with the new platform and was a more stable release.  Drupal Commerce is also set to use PayPal WPS which is what was decided to use for this project.  Challenges arose later when the client wanted to add steps to the cart process.  Such as requiring name and phone numbers after a certain product/trip was added to the cart.  I managed to handle this request with Rules and WebForm but the solution was not very graceful.  We also discovered that Drupal Commerce doesn’t have a feature/module to add a specific dollar amount to the order total.  We could use the taxes module to add a percentage fee to the order total, so we managed to make that work.

Overall, I’m glad I finally got to work with a more advanced platform and I was more then thrilled with building my first E-Commerce Website.  I’ve learned a lot about Drupal 7 and Drupal Commerce and from this experience, I will be able to better advise future clients on what can be done with this combination and what (currently) can’t.

What is your experience with Drupal 7 and Commerce?