mp3sa

[mp3sa-front.png]
www.mp3sa.co.za a website developed by WebBuilders, addresses the lack of access to quality digital content in the local (South Africa) market. The site promotes local digital music resources and retails iTunes gift cards. There are articles about the South African & International music industry and soon there will also be reviews on iOS apps.

The site was developed using Drupal 6, due to the Commerce project on 7 not yet supporting "product key".

Online Store:

The online store uses Ubercart to run the daily activities within the store. The need to assign voucher numbers to a product is the main requirement which Ubercart achieves through an add-on module "Ubercart Product Keys". This module sends the product keys off to the buyer, updates the database and ensures that everything is in sync and that we don't send out duplicate keys.

[mp3sa-affiliate.png]

Affiliate:

After launching the website a few of the prominent bloggers in South Africa enquired about an affiliate program. With a quick look at what support Drupal & Ubercart provided, we came across "u"Ubercart Affiliate v2" -- what a beautiful module! It was simple to integrate and had very little knock on with the theme we had designed in house (it had to look Apple-ly). With one change to the style sheet it was in. We can now let the affiliates log in with an account and see their stats including number of click's and earnings.

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Band Reviews:

The ability to write and publish news and reviews for some of the local bands we like and support was high on our list of priorities. The South African music industry really suffers and artists battle to get decent attendance at live shows. A small population of 50 million is widely cited as a factor. We have a lot of talent here with bands like Fokofpolisiekar, Taxi Violence, Knave, etc. and we wanted to show our support there. The band pages really turned out super slick we think. We are going to soon provide something similar for iOS apps that we can't get our hands on in the South African iTunes store.. to highlight that plight.

Why Drupal?

We, myself (Lathan) and a friend (Martin) just cant quite get enough of Drupal, its been in our food for the past 5 years. Our reason for choosing Drupal is simple, we know it backwards and there is no other CMS with the community that Drupal has. The framework is solid! We are over the moon with entities (even though we had to choose Drupal 6 for this one). By now we know the good modules and the bad ones pretty well.
This project all started out as a comment "hey, we could do a store for that". Two days later we ponied up and in true agile spirit sprinted the website out. We joked that within a day we could have the site up and fleshed out with both an articles / blog section and the store as well as a customised "lick of paint" to add shine.

Our evaluation of the payment modules and what worked for us at the end of the day:

The biggest hurdle for commerce projects in South Africa has always been payment gateways. Surprisingly, there are quite a few modules for South African payment gateways now. Setcom, Monster Pay, My Gate VCS to name but a few. Some of these do have really high rates on sales and we would lose 5% in commissions and charges if we went this route. These services also require that you operate as a fully registered business which makes the barrier to entry, for an ordinary guy on the street, that much harder.

• Setcom has been around for quite a while and the module developer is active in the South African group. The company has however changed and rebranded as MonsterPay. The MonsterPay gateway does not have its module up on Drupal and hosts it via their site. In the end its basically, line for line that of the Setcom module. Sounds good enough but it really sucked that their module was not on drupal.org and that their terms and conditions would not allow the sale of gift vouchers.
• VCS require a merchant bank account and we could not go there. Their rate is also high on each sale.
• My Gate is the same as VCS, also requiring a merchant bank account. It's probably the most stable of the South African gateways out there but we could not use it.

So all our bets were now with PayPal. To note though, South Africa only recently got integration into PayPal. We can't sell products in Rands (our local currency) as PayPal does not support that yet. The fees are still rather high but it was the only real option for us at the end of the day.
In South Africa we were always going to battle choosing a gateway as the tax man has some strict requirements and wants to be able to trace every single transaction. We are keeping our fingers crossed that, down the line, PayPal allows us to retail in our local currency.

Modules

• Ubercart - for the store. It has the support we need and it is stable. Built-in stock tracking support yay!
• Ubercart product keys - allows us to upload and track keys that are sent to customers. One could also use this to distribute software keys. Needs some love in the stock levels department but it works really well for the most part.
• Views - always required but we still think there are a few features missing from this; like better DISTINCT support.
• CCK - for the attributes we needed on the Band, Product and Articles.
• 'me' Aliases - Drupal still does some funky stuff and does not have 'tokenable' menu items (such as useer id's). This module helps us there.
• Affiliate2 - wow nocked my socks off this module did. Feeling the love with it thanks guys!
• Global Redirect - SEO
• ImageCache - for image resizing throughout the site.
• Mailchimp - as their service rocks, love the 360deg reports they have.
• Menu Trails - for keeping the menu items depressed when navigating down the tree.. wish they had Views support though.
• Node Reference - we needed to reference a Band off of the Albums. The Views building to do this "from the Album" and "to the Band" gets kind of fun as the Album has the node reference and the use of relationships is tricky there.
• Path redirect- Some old pages from an existing html site that needed redirection to the new content.
• PayPal - payment for Ubercart. The sandbox accounts they have at PayPal really suck, but once we had it all configured correctly it worked like a dream.
• FileField - for the image cache module.
• Insert - to put some images in the body of the articles.
• Wysiwyg - this still really blows in my opinion wish Drupal had better support for this thing... clients always need it! Not everyone knows HTML.
• XMLSitemap - SEO for submitting the website to the search engines.
• Drupad - some iPhone admin still a way to go but its a start.
• Mollom - that super service from mollom stooping spam in it's tracks, a must have for any website.

As you can see we are pretty lean and mean at the moment. Future plans involve some rating and the new apps reviews content type. All we require is either the awesome flag or radio activity modules, they both rock.

Zero custom modules were used.

There we have it! A really slick site in 2 days, how rocking is that?