by Michael Peacock
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Product Description
This book will show you how to sell online using the award-winning open-source Drupal web application. No prior experience of Drupal is required; you will learn all you need as you step through the creation of an online shop. You will learn the basics of Drupal, and see how to use the standard features of Drupal to begin construction of an online shop, and improve the selling interface, handling of orders, and reporting with new modules and other customizations. This book is for people who want to start selling online as quickly as possible, and want to see how to use the proven Drupal platform to achieve this. The book is ideal for use in a small business with only basic in-house technical skills. It will also be useful for developers who not only want to create an e-commerce site, but also want a CMS platform for expanding the site in the future. No prior knowledge of Drupal is required. No PHP experience is expected, although it will be useful. Basic knowledge of e-commerce will also be useful, although the main concepts are introduced and covered as required.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Raunchywear loves Drupal, 2008-07-23
Drupals' ecommerce offering is now very competitive with Mambo and Virtuemart. This book is an excellent tutorial for those wanting to use Drupal as an ecommerce solution. What we particularly like at Raunchywear Swimwear and Lingerie is the apparel specific focus of Drupal.
This book is well laid out and even includes hints and tips about connecting Drupal with CRM and marketing options.
Well worth the read for anyone considering an ecommerce site using open source solutions.
It's also crammed into only 245 pages.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
 Good Introduction, 2008-07-07
Technology books are generally expected to be on the shelves shortly after major releases of a particular software and therefore do not receive the most thorough editing possible. They're also quite expensive considering they have a relatively short shelf life because they're only really in demand until the new version of the software is released. Given that this book delivers on both counts and exhaustively details the cheesy example of Doug's Dino store, it's still a worthy read.
Well, it won't do you much good to simply read it. This book steps the reader through the process of setting up a website to sell goods and/or services over the internet. The book tells the story of a web-developer/designer(you) that contracts with the owner of a physical store to set up a website to sell his products and services on-line.
In the first chapter, the author explains how to install Drupal 5.x and the e-Commerce module, the most recent versions of this e-business duo. If you are interested in Ubercart, e-Commerce's other Drupal competitor, you're reading the wrong book. Micheal does a fair job of pointing out the pitfalls of downloading and installing the software. I wished he had directed the reader to download all the modules that would be needed for later chapters even if they wouldn't be installed until later. There is no one place in the book you can find a list of all the modules you will need for a particular store implementation.
In the next couple of chapters, the author explains the basics of Drupal and planning the store including even legal requirements. In my experience, these chapters and the chapter on theming were really lacking. My experience with customers suggests that they usually want to start with how the site will look. Granted this book isn't about theming, but even considering that, the look and feel topics are really sparse. Customers relate their online experience to how they want their physical store to look. All this form following function jargon is something for the developer and designer to juggle, the owner wants pretty first. Another problem I have with these chapters relates to the decision not to use CCK and the image field to display the products in the catalog. Although he suggests later that it might be a good idea to use CCK, it seems that a product catalog might be a perfect application of this popular module, and would ease the administration of a dynamic e-store.
The chapter about users, roles, and permissions is a must. This chapter alone will save countless hours of head scratching, and could single-handedly save the book. Many of the ways that users, roles, and permissions and creative uses of the taxonomy module can be implemented will allow the user to use, create, and sell almost limitless types of products and services.
The next chapters direct the reader in set up the shopping cart and checkout functionality, including detailed explanations of taxes, shipping, and payment gateways. I would like to have learned more about secure checkout, and security in general, it seems like a pretty important topic to a store owner and his customers. A small section of one chapter was spent on the CiviCRM module, it should have been skipped or covered in much greater detail. In the last chapter on Marketing Your Business, the author provides an extensive list of ways to market one's business, but doesn't describe how Drupal could be used to automate the process, or even recommended other products for the job. I bet there are a number of things that Drupal can do to help promote one's business.
Bottom line: Selling online with Drupal e-Commerce is a great introduction to the process of setting up a Drupal website for an internet based business. The author does a great job pointing out places where your intuition can get you into trouble, and points you in the right direction to modules not included in be basic Drupal: e-Commerce installation, but if you are new to selling, period; require a knock-out store design, or need help advertising your site, you are going to need a few more books. To it's credit, it's not a book simply about Drupal, but leads the reader through the whole process and discusses all the processes and services a store-owner will need to set up his store. I can't give it a big thumbs up, but a worthy read none-the-less.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
 A book that works!, 2008-06-15
I have read many books about using particular software applications. Almost always the instructions given are incomplete or don't work without some technical work on the part of the reader. Normally the author of the book hasn't paid enough attention to the state already stored on his or her computer and, when a reader follows the written instructions, all sorts of peculiar little problems arise: file not found, environment variable not set, etc.
I worked through this book from cover to cover and, put simply, it was correct. Everything it said worked first time.
I installed Drupal and eCommerce on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and simply followed the instructions in this book. Within an hour I had an eCommerce website up and running.
I strongly recommend this book (and the underlying Drupal and eCommerce packages) to anyone setting up an eCommerce web site for a small or medium business.
6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
enables selling on websites, 2008-05-03
While strictly, this book says you need no prior experience with Drupal, it can also be considered a sequel to Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6. The latter concerned itself with general purpose websites, with some emphasis on handling user contributions, like blogging. But Peacock addresses the case where your website has commercial intent. You are selling something on it.
There are numerous topics. Along with roles, which are primarily customer and staff in this situation. Logically, we start with making content. A catalog of items for sale. The museum example chosen in the text lends itself to easily making different sections of the catalog. Not just a flat list of items. In general, the book suggests that you do a careful top-down grouping of your items. In a manner that will seem logical to visitors to the website. It advises to keep the content "plain and simple". For most of you, that will be so. Exceptions might arise if what you are selling is specialised and where visitors might expect comprehensive data sheets, say, on the items. Think perhaps of fine chemicals, real estate or cars. Then again, these items tend to be individually expensive, so it may be economic to provide large content.
Unsurprisingly, Drupal lets you easily add photos to the catalog. An important selling point, to grab a visitor's attention.
It's not all about the webpages that a visitor sees. One strength of Drupal is that it has several payment gateways. Eight in the default installation, and modules for other gateways are also available on the web. The default support includes PayPal, Eurobill and Eway. To a general audience, PayPal is probably the best known. Some gateways are only available in certain countries. Depending on your location, you may choose to sign up for as many of these as make sense, for fitting your expected customer demographics.
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