2. Why Drupal is ideal for ecommerce
Ryan Szrama, the lead developer of Drupal Commerce and President / CEO at Commerce Guys, recently gave a presentation where he spends 4.5 minutes arguing that Drupal is an ideal platform on which to build an ecommerce framework, and why Drupal should be more than a frontend to other systems, like Shopify or Hybris. The first reason that Ryan mentions rings very true to me, and should resonate with all of the people who chose Drupal to support software freedom in the first place: licensing. Drupal is GPL and is not proprietary or dual-licensed. This is a distinct advantage for adopters of Drupal, but it makes it commercially harder for the independent software vendor (ISV) to funnel investment back into the software product.
Ryan also highlights the flexibility of Drupal for building business applications. By this he means that user management, authentication, content modelling, creation, editing, and rendering, rules engines, rich asset management, and multichannel publishing are all solved problems. There is great momentum behind Drupal to excel at these tasks and become better over time, so piggybacking on Drupal on the way towards ecommerce greatness makes perfect sense. Other systems like Magento or Oro have to address these problem spaces too, and it distracts them from focusing on their core functionality and capabilities.
This is very much in line with what Dries Buytaert said of the state of ecommerce in his recent blog post:
commerce platforms have not added many tools for rich content management. Instead they have been investing in capabilities needed to compete in the commerce market; order management systems (OMS), omnichannel shopping (point of sale, mobile, desktop, kiosk, etc), improved product information management (PIM) and other vital commerce capabilities. The limited investment in content management capabilities has left merchants looking for better tools to take control of the customer experience, something that Drupal addresses extremely well.
In short, all of the tools and tricks that Drupal has developed for content management (do we still call it a CMS?) apply directly to product management and marketing in ecommerce scenarios.
Ryan also adds that Drupal is a very good platform for integrating with other systems. Thanks to its strong focus on RESTful APIs, Drupal possesses a far stronger framework than most ecommerce systems for talking to CRMs, ERPs, PIMs, analytics engines, search tools, personalisation managers, and so forth.
Watch Ryan’s full presentation to find out more about the state of Drupal 8, and to hear his version of the pitch for why Drupal should be considered as a native ecommerce tool.
