What is UberCart?

Ubercart is an open source e-commerce solution fully integrated with the leading open source content management system, Drupal. Ubercart is great for anyone looking to build a community around a product, sell access to premium content, offer paid file downloads, and much more. All of these can be done while maintaining a seamless connection to your users.

Ubercart leverages the advantages of Drupal’s major core and contributed systems, providing the users with shopping cart functionality that integrates with other parts of your company or community website.  Developers can add to or alter Ubercart 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 as Ubercart continues to evolve to meet the demands of a growing community.

Key aspects

Given the fact that Ubercart is built as a module package for the search engine friendly Drupal CMS, this means that you can fully integrate your store with the rest of your site.

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.

Some notable features of UberCart include:

-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 price and weight. 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.

-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.

-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.

A newer version of UberCart – Drupal Commerce

UberCart is a great option, but unfortunately, it has seen a bit of decline in the past couple of years. The Drupal 7 version of the module is where it saw most of its success with usage peaking in 2014/2015. Unfortunately, usage has been continuously dropping since then. Many people have started shifting over from Ubercart to Drupal Commerce. But why would anyone pick Drupal Commerce over UberCart? Well, Drupal Commerce is more secure, more robust, it offers better pricing accuracy and much more.

If you’re just starting out, we would probably recommend taking a look at Drupal Commerce instead of UbertCart. But if you’re an existing UberCart user, you can probably keep on using it for now, especially if you feel like it fulfills your needs.
However, if you feel like it’s time for an upgrade, then the clear upgrade path for you would be Drupal Commerce. Much of the community has already began shifting over to the newer platform, so you’ll probably find Drupal Commerce a bit easier to use.

As such, no matter which option you end up going with, we are sure that you will be satisfied. But if we were to make a pick, we would probably choose Drupal Commerce over Ubercart. It’s newer, more user-friendly and a bit more secure…