We had to make a tough decision early this year — which Drupal e-commerce package was right for us? There are currently two full e-commerce solutions for Drupal, eCommerce and Ubercart.

We chose Ubercart and jumped in with both feet. We’re happy to say that nine months later, this has definitely shown itself to be the right choice.

This post isn’t really going to discuss the technical merits or specific features of each option. This is better served by doing your own research on each one to see if there are any particular features that you need. What I’m going to focus on here are the less tangible aspects; things that we have since found to be clear indicators of the strength of Ubercart.

1) Big names are using it

Prominent companies such as AOL and Warner Brothers Records has been using Ubercart for a while. More recently, Lullabot launched an Ubercart site for their conference registration (and will be covering UC in their upcoming book), and Acquia’s registration for their beta service currently uses Ubercart. Support from key players like this has a lot of weight in the Drupal community.

2) Stable release for Drupal 5, significant progress on Drupal 6 version

Ubercart for Drupal 5 has been at a stable 1.x branch since the beginning of June. While it’s not yet stable, there is a dev version out for Drupal 6, and I know of at least one brave soul using it on a live site already. This is a testament to the active development community of Ubercart.

3) Ubercart is highly represented at Drupal events

There have been sessions on Ubercart at the last three Drupalcons, numerous local Drupal camps, FrOScon, etc. Ubercart even held their own Ubercamp this summer, for developers and interested parties to get together for a weekend of coding and planning.

4) Very active community

Dozens of new forum posts a day from its 3500 registered users, numerous code commits every week, and several community-contributed modules added or updated each week. The support time for issues and forum posts is very quick. Some will point out the “un-Drupalness” of having a site separate from drupal.org itself, which is a fair point — but brings me to #5…

5) High visibility outside of the Drupalsphere

This is nearly unheard of for Drupal modules, but given Ubercart’s high visibility, it’s actually been a big draw for users coming into Drupal itself for the first time. They also recently had a mention in PC Magazine. However, Ubercart is making a major effort to get more directly involved, including getting as many of the 200+ contributions uploaded to ubercart.org onto drupal.org as possible.

6) Full time developers with commercial backing

While the Drupal project itself has been proof that full time, funded developers aren’t needed to create a great product, in the world of e-commerce, it’s certainly helped. There are currently two (soon to be three) full time Ubercart developers, and an estimated dozen or so more from other organizations who also do only Ubercart development.

7) Focus on being user friendly

The Ubercart developers don’t want you to have to be a developer to set up an online store. There are a million settings and configuration possibilities for creating an online store, but they’ve put a strong focus on the UI, simple checkout, and intelligent defaults. This goes a long way in deploying a site right the first time, that looks great.

Learning more about Ubercart

If you’re new to Ubercart, Ryan’s (the lead developer) presentation from Drupalcon is a great overview of the structure and features.

Also, check out our handbook page on the basics of creating an e-commerce store with Drupal.

What about eCommerce?

This isn’t to say that the eCommerce module is no longer useful. The upcoming version (v4) looks promising, but development and the community haven’t been very active lately. I had a great conversation with Jakob Perry, who has developed extensively for both packages, and he summed it up nicely:
“Ubercart is a great package if you’re looking to deploy a full-featured, out-of-the-box ecommerce solution integrated into Drupal… If you’re looking for more of an ecommerce framework, look into eCommerce v4. Examples include using eC receipt module as a simple payment gateway for event registration, or an interface into an external EDI or ERP. Both of which Ubercart is overkill or too monolithic to integrate into.”

While Ubercart is the right solution for most online stores, you’ll want to look carefully at your needs and skills before you make that decision!

Inspiration: Ubercart showcase sites

I’ll leave off with links to some fantastic Ubercart-powered online stores:
NutriPrima - amazing, custom graphic design — you’ll never guess it’s Drupal!
H.JLYNN collection - beautiful, elegant theming
RiffTrax - huge, advanced store with digital downloads
Fleurville - great use of images and features on product pages