Drupal 6 E-Commerce Website

Deroutdoorshop - A Drupal 6 E-commerce Website

Link: www.deroutdoorshop.de

Background:

Deroutdorrshop is a classic e-commerce site powered by Drupal 6 and Ubercart. The company was in a not so unusual situation: A well established EBay power seller, strong integration in Amazon and a totally outdated Shop solution with nearly no customers.
The new shop-system is designed to establish the own brand and bring more and more business to the own shop.
With no real Database or any commercial Software in the Background, we decided to look for a full open-source solution with a lot of flexibility.
Also, as the site will future more and more content from manufacturers, users and ourselves, we wanted as many community features available as possible for future use.
The new site is very easy to use, with almost the whole interface and all menus completely translated.
A lesson we have learned the hard way in other projects was, that the search-engine-optimizing is done the best right from the start; with Drupal it is easy to implement a lot of helpful features.
While at the moment, some features are currently not in use, it was important to us to include some SEM features and multilingual options from the beginning.
This way the shop can already generate revenue while the translations are going to be made at a later point.

The Main features include but are not limited to:

(1) We created a completely new corporate identity including logo and name.

(2)There are three different search engines, for every task the right one. At first there is our custom AJAX search which is placed in the header. This one allows a quick search for products or SKU´s (EAN´s in Europe) and greatly enhances the Drupal experience.

The second one is the faceted search for a classic faceted search environment.

The third one is what we call the SEM search, where we configured the drupal search to provide URLs which might perform well as landing pages for adword campaigns. E.g.: if you make a campaign for red bags, you can just use /search/red/bags as landing page.

(3)A "products that might be from interest" section which can be filled by hand or by any algorithm written in PHP.

Timeline:

We didn´t have a tight schedule, but the nature of the business forced us to finish the work in august so we would have some time to launch the website, include products and include the site in all search engines.

Design:

We bought a basic übercart template and went from there. In the meantime there is not much left from the original code. We used a lot of blocks with PHP visibility options to show information where it is needed. We styled every icon, border, button, hover animations, animated icons etc. using our own corporate identity.
We also make extensive use of the jquery library for the auto complete and all effects on the site.

Challenges:

The biggest challenge was the fact that the company is based in both Austria and Germany , has customers in Austria, Germany and Swiss and all these countries have different taxes but very strong laws how to apply and show them in online shops. Luckily, with the Ubercart VAT module we where available to overcome all issues.
Another problem was the performance of the AJAX search provided by the finder module which works fine for text but not for the rich experience we were looking for.
We also needed to integrate a CC-Processor and were very pleased to see that our clients choice mpay24 worked with Drupal out of the box.

Modules:

you name it - we have it. we really use it all.
Beside the usual suspects like views, übercart cck and lightbox 2 we
use the faceted search module, the VAT module, both discount and Coupon module, internalization almost every SEO module, tokens pathauto, different taxonomies including the taxonomy menu, five star rating and we work a lot with custom PHP and JavaScript.

Team:

The team is based on 3 peoples: One designer Martin who did all the CI and some CSS, Alexandra who did the whole configuration and everything about the products and John did the template stuff. (www.dieupdater.de) Also we used Dylan Verheul´s auto complete script and countless anonymous contributions from the drupal and the ubercart community.