With technology developing so quickly, the most important decision when you make eCommerce website is which content management system to use. The CMS handles the functionality of the site. Select the right CMS, and your site will be scalable and easily accessible across a wide range of devices. To keep up with the times, online stores also need to offer simple navigation and a personalized experience rich with interactive elements.
Drupal is a cutting edge CMS that offers top of the line digital solutions for all of your eCommerce needs. You might ask, “What is the use of Drupal? Why should I decide to make a Drupal 8 store when there are so many other choices out there?”
The answer is simple. Drupal offers customizability, flexibility, and security. It’s a modular, open source CMS that lets you tailor your site to your brand, functionality, and approach. It’s perfect for all businesses, from the largest to the smallest. Plus, its solid, versatile design lets you modify the site and develop it with a minimum of a hassle.
Let’s take a look at some of Drupal’s benefits and how some major companies have used Drupal sites to improve their business and reach new heights of success.
Benefits of Drupal Web Platform
When you create a website using Drupal, you tap into a wide range of benefits that are hard to find in any other CMS. First and foremost, customers want security. They want to be confident when entering their information to make a purchase.
Drupal Commerce offers the highest rated security currently available. It has never yet been subject to a widely exploited vulnerability, and regular patches and safeguard measures are issued to improve its safety continually.
Another great feature is that it is open source and has the backing of a strong Drupal community that exchanges ideas and innovations. Its unique design lets you add as many new web pages as you want without having to adjust the infrastructure.
Let’s have a look at the main benefits of Drupal:
Flexibility
Drupal 8 websites are modular, so they can be easily customized with thousands of plug-ins and modules to give you exactly the functionality you want.
It comes packed with custom features that can be modified, adjusted, and implemented as needed. These include features for social media, SEO, CRM, and security. Drupal also lets you manage and create many different types of content.
A site built with Drupal is designed to handle blogs, articles, polls, statistics, videos, and other content types. It lets you create content-rich sites for any niche, from media to marketing. Also, since it’s easy to edit design elements, the web page configurations can be made as simple or as complex as needed.
Personalization and Great UX
Your website is your storefront. It carries the theme and message of your brand. So, it needs to be personalized to reflect what you have to offer. Personalization is what makes the difference between a conversion and a bounce.
Drupal provides a broad range of themes and color pallets suitable for any purpose. Its advanced system is simple to build and maintain. Drupal comes stocked with built-in tools for user interface (UI) and user experience (UX).
The result is that you can offer the customer a targeted, interactive experience with intuitive navigation and a user-friendly interface. Plus, Drupal customer support is second to none. Whatever the needs of your site and your customer, they can be met with a minimum of hassle.
Mobile-first Architecture
There are more mobile devices in existence now than ever before, and they are more accessible to the global population. So, one of the most important things to keep your site competitive is to make it not only mobile-friendly but mobile first.
When sites are designed around desktop architecture, it can be challenging to optimize the mobile experience fully. Drupal 8 is designed with this trend in mind, suitable for desktop but designed mobile-first. This means that the Drupal mobile site comes fully optimized for mobile devices. This saves time and effort, as well as making sure that your site is accessible to anyone, anywhere.
All-In-One: CMS for Different Business Needs
Whatever you need for your eCommerce store, Drupal brings it within reach. Successful sites are based on customer needs. They guide them through discovery and purchase of products or services, making it a breeze for them to find any information they want along the way.
Drupal 8 eCommerce modules let you tailor site functionality to the user experience you’d like to provide. They let you connect with and engage the audience through Google Analytics modules, robust APIs, and a versatile system interface that can fit any system architecture you need.
Also, your Drupal store incorporates a wide range of features and tools that improve the experience for both developers and users. It is easy to develop a store in a short period, plus optimization and security is a strong side of Drupal CMS.
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Drupal Great Website Examples
The current trend is for static sites to dwindle and make room for dynamic content. The content management system needs to be robust, accessible through a range of digital contact points, and abreast of current trends in customer engagement. Drupal excels at eCommerce. This is reflected by the many high-profile companies that have used it for their eCommerce websites.
To give you the overall vision of the best Drupal eCommerce sites, we’ve prepared a list of them based on the most successful companies:
Box Platform
Box is a company that specializes in collaboration software and simple file sharing. All of their services are online, unlike Tesla. They’ve used Drupal to create a website that showcases their online solutions clearly and easily. It’s user-friendly and efficient, with a crisp professional feel.
The site gives direct access to their proprietary software and code, which can be integrated with other digital solutions, like Google Apps, IBM, Slack, and Office 365. Box currently services many high profile clients, including Pandora, Boston Scientific, and P&G.
LUSH
LUSH is a site that offers premium handmade soaps and body care supplies. Their site uses Drupal Commerce features to combine commerce and content, providing inspiring stories that reach users across the globe. Users can reach the site easily through any device.
The site is clean and streamlined. It engages the customer with an introduction page featuring the newest line and clear call to action buttons. The setup practically guarantees click-throughs.
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Pinterest Business
Pinterest is a great place to share images, quotes, recipes, and other forms of online content. It’s image-rich and has a reach of over 175 million users. Pinterest Business was created as a branch of the parent site, designed for presented services and products to this Pinterest audience.
Once again, this is a Drupal store. It integrates seamlessly with the main website, which was built with Python. And easy is the keyword here. It’s simple to add subpages, implement additional functionalities, and integrate with external systems. Drupal has allowed Pinterest to link their existing audience with a new service in a fraction of the time required for making an entirely new website.
Royal Mail
Royal Mail is a UK based site that offers a wide range of solutions for delivering, receiving, and redirecting mail. It also allows customers to track items, buy and print postage, and pay fees online.
Drupal Commerce has allowed them to develop a simple REST API that serves and seamlessly integrates multiple sites. The result is a content data server that combines all of their many services into one easily accessible contact point.
Savant
Savant is a service-oriented industry that offers home automation systems. Their goal was to craft an immersive experience with a modular CMS that is simple to maintain and update.
Drupal was the perfect solution. It offers strong performance, versatility, and a modular architecture that can be adjusted or scaled as necessary without a major overhaul to the whole site.
Platform longevity is key, as digital developments are moving so quickly that a poorly planned CMS can make the site obsolete in no time. This is especially important for Savant, as it is a technological service that is constantly expanding into new markets. The website reflects this, emphasizing imagery and animation and reflecting the feeling of the brand.
Hermès
Hermes offers a wide range of products including women’s clothing, menswear, perfume, and fashion accessories. Their site makes use of video plugins to feature fashion shows that present their clothing lines in all their glory. It is based on Drupal Commerce and we see that it works great for the business benefits.
It also has branded preloader, perfect site colors, and fonts that represent a brand and strengthen its positions in customers’ mind. Besides smart design with various useful blocks to showcase products perfectly, it has high-quality images, and let customer complete the purchase. They offer a wide range of shipping and payment options and integrate their physical store with their online market with tools to find the brick and mortar shop nearest you.
Manhattan
Manhattan Associates is a company based in connecting suppliers with buyers to build an entire supply chain. To broaden the client base and meet digital strategy goals, they decided to have a premium site built with Drupal 8.
With a global client base, Manhattan required marketing automation, integration with third-party services and tech, and translation services. Given that their operations work on a massive scope and have many moving parts, Manhattan also needed a site that could fully integrate the CRM and powerful editorial tools to educate customers and users in the best use of the services.
Their website is fast, responsive, and clean. The homepage offers testimonials, demos, and CTAs. This site is an example of the power of Drupal to coordinate a host of complex functions and different services.
As you can see, Drupal is being used by some of the biggest names in commerce by niches ranging from online services to physical products. With a CMS this robust and versatile, the sky’s the limit!