What Is Ubercart?

Ubercart is an exciting open source e-commerce package that fully integrates your online store with Drupal, the leading open source content management system.

This is a killer combination for anyone looking to build a community around a product, sell access to premium content, offer paid file downloads, and much much more!

Ubercart was designed to take advantage of Drupal's major core and contributed systems, providing its users with shopping cart functionality that seamlessly integrates with other parts of your company or community website.

To learn more about the benefits of using Drupal, check out the article which answers the question, "Why use Drupal for e-commerce?"

One of the key strengths of Ubercart is its design that allows official and third party developers to add to or alter its features to accommodate virtually any e-commerce need. This means you'll never have to change the source code to add new features, so you'll have an easy upgrade path when the core gets improved or fixes are released.

Current online stores are leveraging Ubercart to meet the following e-commerce needs:

* Selling physical goods from various sized product catalogs.
* Selling file downloads (i.e. music, videos, software).
* Selling site access for members only websites, including automatic renewals and expiration of user access.

Take a look at our Ubercart demo site, an ecommerce site that sells books, is the latest code release.

The demo site has many of the core features in a default Drupal installation.

Key Aspects:

* Built as a module package for the search engine friendly Drupal CMS, meaning you can fully integrate your store with the rest of your site or community. Ubercart can also be enhanced by the dozens of contributed Drupal modules and themes.

* Designed to be enhanced and modified. The core systems of Ubercart, including products, checkout, orders, payments, and order fulfillment are all designed to incorporate contributed modules. (In programming lingo, these systems are all extensible.)

* Strong desire for usability, reflected in testing, changing things, testing again, changing more things, and ultimately letting you customize how all the pieces fit together yourself.

* Strong desire for flexibility, reflected in testing, changing things... you get the point.

Current Features:

* Configurable product catalog includes catalog pages and a block to display product categories.

* Flexible product creation system. Create normal products by default. Add fields to store additional product information using Drupal's CCK system.

* Flexible product attributes system. Create user selectable attributes for your products that modify the price, SKU/model, and/or weight of items as the customer adds them to his or her cart. Set default attribute/option sets for each product class to easily create many similar products.

* Single page checkout. All checkout information gathered on a single screen composed of configurable checkout panes. Third party modules can define checkout panes to replace or add to the default set, making it easy to customize the checkout experience.

* Automatic account generation (anonymous checkout). Accounts and emails are automatically generated based on the customer's e-mail address. (Optional setting allows customers to specify account names and passwords in checkout.) For return customers, previously used addresses will be listed on the checkout page for easy access.

* Simple order processing. The order administration screens have been designed by and for our salesmen. We believe there is always room for improvement and will try to make it happen! Order screens use the "pane" model, so the screens are configurable and extensible to accommodate a wide variety of e-commerce applications.

* Simple order creation and editing. Easy to create orders manually for customers, adding products, shipping prices, etc. from a single screen. Line items system makes it easy to add fees, discounts, and coupons to orders.

* Integrated payment system that acts as a bridge between acceptable payment methods (check, credit card, cod, etc.) and payment gateways (Cyber Source, Authorize.net, PayPal, etc.). Configurable payment processing and tracking, and easy to use credit card terminal with varying levels of access.

* Activity logging. Enable logging to see all the changes made to an order, including payment processing. (Your accountant will love this!)

* XML import/export allows you import products, attributes, orders, and customers from your old store into Ubercart or export products, attributes, orders, and customers from your Ubercart store