Ubercart is our Choice for eCommerce Sites in Drupal and eCommerce Sites in General

Ubercart (with Drupal) is not the only eCommerce package that we have used or could use for open source software-based eCommerce web development. We've built eCommerce sites in other platforms like Zen Cart, and we've checked out others like Magento. In the open source software category, there are many decent platforms and some that really excel in specific ways.

We have our favorites. In many ways, Zen Cart is a great choice, although it is no longer our first preference. We took a close look at Magento some time back as it was moving towards a full release. Magento had a number of promising aspects, but we decided against favoring it for eCommerce web development.

For a number of reasons, we transitioned over to doing more and more eCommerce web development in Ubercart. Ubercart is a set of modules that can be added to Drupal in order to provide eCommerce functionality. In part, it makes sense for us to support Ubercart given our strong support of web development with Drupal. But even for new eCommerce-specific sites, we have used Ubercart for many reasoins.

We think Ubercart - along with the rest of Drupal - provides clients with a strong and robust set of tools. While there may be some aspects of other platforms that are a little stronger in some areas, Ubercart and Drupal together do provide a very strong foundation for a production site and further customization. And keeping the eCommerce functionality in the same overall system as other content pages, blogging functionality, and a host of other possibilities makes Ubercart a logical choice.

This is not intended to be an extensive review of Ubercart or its competitors. That would take many more pages - Ubercart itself is quite robust. And to be fair, there are some areas in which we would like to see Ubercart progress further. For example, some stronger functionality for the bulk import and editing of products would be nice. As it is, we have used some other methods through Drupal to bulk upload product data into Ubercart - and it does the job for the most part. But overall, this is an area in which Ubercart could improve. Another area is with product attributes. Again, here to, Ubercart has some very nice functionality for products attributes. But in cases where we have needed to do some more complex development with product attributes, we've seen some ways in which it could benefit from further development or an overhaul.

However, for most eCommerce sites, Ubercart will provide all that is needed and much more that may never be used. At this point, there are really a limited number of projects or website needs that would lead us to suggest another system over Ubercart - although when we work with clients we review a number of factors on a client-by-client basis to make recommendations.