I recently installed the Drupal 8 version of Ubercart.

Ubercart is the most popular - and most well-developed - e-commerce platform for Drupal. It was easy to see why after I tried it: the sheer amount and variety of features it provides, the flexibility and extensibility of its systems, the large amount of documentation and support available on various third-party websites.

Installation was simple, as was setting up a basic e-commerce site. I particularly liked the administrative interface and the degree of support found on its website, such as the forum, demo site, and help articles. Although a lot easier to use than osCommerce (a similar e-commerce CMS not for Drupal) and similar in ease of use to Ecommerce (a similar e-commerce module for Drupal), after searching around and trying out a few of the more useful features I did find that the documentation was lacking in a number of areas. My recommendation is to use this module if you must/wish to develop with Drupal; it's almost seamless once setup properly, although it does have a learning curve.

Wow, thanks for this!

Okay, so can we debate on which is better in 2014 - Ubercart or Drupal Commerce??

I first delved into Ubercart about 6 days ago, and I must say, the out-of-the-box features are great. I almost got it up and running then ran into some snags and got frustrated and did a fresh install - THIS TIME using Drupal Commerce. After about 3 1/2 hours of messing around with Drupal Commerce and literally almost smashing my machine and shedding a few tears, I decided to give Ubercart another try because it seems - at least for me - that Ubercart is MUCH more user friendly if you are not a coder. I REPEAT IF YOU ARE NOT A CODER. Which I know a large majority of Drupal wannabes are not (myself included).

So my question is:

Is Ubercart going to be ready - or should I say completely stable for Drupal 7 and more importantly Drupal 8?

I've read that Drupal Commerce is geared more for the future of Drupal and Ubercart is really becoming a dinosaur.

Ubercart seems to have more maintained modules. I've scoured a lot of the modules for Drupal Commerce and a lot of them are not really actively maintained. Specifically options for subscription based websites and ones that use Paypal as a gateway.

Drupal Commerce was much more difficult for me to learn then Ubercart. Even after almost 4 hours I still don't think I really even got anywhere.

I'm trying to setup a site where people can purchase membership packages --> Have a free trial for say 15 days, and then once their Role expires, they are charged a certain amount to keep their membership. How could I go about setting up a site where visitors can choose say a basic membership and have access to only certain Nodes and create only certain Content Types? And then once their membership expires, they go back to a guest.. Something like that. I almost got there with Ubercart and I'm going to try again. With Drupal Commerce I gave up.

So my main questions are:

Is Ubercart going to be around and be competitive, or is it better to go ahead and invest in Drupal Commerce and hope to get over the steep learning curve so in the long run I can scale my site and upgrade it without too much stress?

I close by saying that the BIGGEST flaw I think for Drupal is that it is not geared enough for the average user/developer that wants to build powerful, large scale sites. There are so many hoops and concepts you have to grasp before you can really start appreciating the beauty of what Drupal really has to offer. I think that is why most people give up and why Wordpress is the number one CMS. But I guess anything worth its weight comes at a price. Wordpress is much easier and year after year it becomes more and more scalable and people are building some pretty advanced sites with it. So how can the developers of Drupal find the balance of user friendliness and power that comes with Drupal???

Or should we just keep it simple and tell people:

Drupal is for advanced developers. So if you don't have the time or patience to learn it DON'T USE IT. If you want something less technical and still pretty powerful, go with Wordpress.

I would really love to get others thoughts on all of the above...

Your comments are right on the button! I have heard the topic debated for at least a year. I have a fairly complex web commerce site based on Ubercart. However, it has taken me years to slowly expand it. Most of what you need is there somewhere in the available modules, but you have to compare features and do tests. I have been looking at Drupal 8, but I won't even think of upgrading until I am sure some things are in place. For example, I use the direct payment method (DPM) with Authorize.net. Without that, I would be in bad shape - doing annual reports on security, paying higher fees, etc.

At least with Ubercart you can feel confident that the work will eventually pay off - and you can set up what you need to be in business. The hours mostly match the benefits. However, who knows what things will look like a year from now?

Hello,

I've just started to create a e-commerce site using Drupal and Ubercart. After installing Ubecart I've noticed that I can't enable the Google Checkout module. I've started to search the reason and I've noticed that Google Checkout was retired. Is Ubercart still a good choice for an e-commerce site or should I look for something else? Is there any way to replace Google Checkout in Ubercart? If not, how does it affects my site?
Thank you!

I couldn't code my way out of a wet paper bag but I use both of them. Ubercart because I've used it since 1, it easy to set up and get going and its mature. I started to use Commerce a while ago if I have lots of products that have multiple sizes like say bottles/containers. In Commerce its a pain in the ass to have to create a product for each size and gets quite tedious but I can get better product weight separation for shipping this way.

If you don't have much coding skills and don't have super complex product variation requirements Ubercart is a breeze to set up while Commerce will be more complicated.

Its nice to have multiple options as this creates competition and better products.

Hi, Thanks for these awesome tutorials they have help a great deal! I am however having an issue with file downloads not being available to the purchasing customer until the order status is set to completed by admin?
Is there a way to make the file download available to the customer without having to manually change the status of the order?

Many Thanks

Daniel

I have been searching for detailed guidance on setting up downloadable products as I can't get this working with Drupal 7 Ubercart 3.10. Tutorial #7 (series #1) begins the process but then says the rest of it will be in a later tutorial - but it isn't. All the guidance I can find refers me to more detailed instructions on ubercart.org but that's giving a 'site offline' message and has been doing so for weeks.

I'm getting to the point where the customer can raise an order and get billed and notified of the order but does not get notified of the download path and nothing shows up in the 'files' tab against the user account. The guidance suggests that a rule is needed here with the hint that one should be created by default. On my site, there are two rules, both referring to emailing and neither relating to files or downloads that I can see

There is also a problem (separate I think but maybe not) that the Ubercart ordering system is not working properly for anonymous users. It claims to set up a user (and sends emails to this effect) but the one-time login goes to a 404 screen and trying to log in directly using the created UID and password gets an 'account blocked on not activated' error message

Has anyone any suggestions where I go next with this?