Hello all,
For an upcoming project, I will need to incorporate commerce capabilities into Drupal for the first time, so I am investigating my options.
Thing is, the new site I'm making will not be a full fledged e-shop with a lot of product listings etc. The requirements is to sell:
- Festival tickets / passes
- Hotel bookings near festival venue
- Festival pass + hotel combos
My question is as follows:
Though it interests me to familiarize my self with Drupal Commerce, would DC be overkill for the above use case? Would I be better off simply using redirects to Paypal? As far as I know, Paypal can redirect back to a landing page in the original site, so that the user experience is not disrupted, right?
Currently there is no requirement for merchandise sales, so I'm thinking a cart would be unnecessary ("add to cart" does not make sense for festival tickets and hotel bookings). I would just need a one step checkout process.
I guess customer tracking and stock management (how many hotel rooms left) could be a motivation to use DC, but I guess the site owner can track orders via their Paypal Control Panel too, correct?
Any input would be most welcome.
Thank you in advance
Comments
To answer my own question..
For cases where product ranges are limited and back office management via Drupal module would be too much effort, I guess the following approaches will also do:
You have made a career choice ->
You have made a career choice, Absolutely do it in Commerce. If You go these other ways You will be just spinning Your wheels. e-commerce is one of the hottest things on the Net, time spent learning the most powerful shopping cart is time well spent. Learning drupal commerce is learning drupal. Your adding fields to cck, making rules which is off the hook!, Using views, taxonomy and blocks to display stuff. The best learning videos: http://vimeo.com/channels/commerceguys/page:1 http://nodeone.se/en/coding-for-rules-2
also because Your using drupal and there are almost a million of us. You can take advantage of the sharpest cutting edge code. You can instantly make Your site phone ready with a RWD theme like http://omega.developmentgeeks.com/ http://adaptivethemes.com/demos/contrib/?theme=corolla
Power beyond belief!
ed
Guess I will use both, each for each own project
Thanks for the feedback and the training resources.
After some thought, I think I am going to use both, but for different projects.
The simple ticket selling site can do with a solution such as e-junkie which has the benefit of simple checkout and on-page rendering of the cart in a lightbox.
I have a full e-shop project also coming up for selling clothes, so I think I will do that in Drupal Commerce, so as to incorporate also inventory management, etc.
P.S. Rendering the shopping cart in DC in a lightbox would also be positive for the user experience. Perhaps there could be a module for that, if there is not already