Drupal Commerce 2.x is here
This blog post is a brief summary of what kind of online shop services we can provide to our clients using Commerce 2.x. It is currently in active development by the Drupal community, but we regard the current beta version as ready for production sites. We used the brand new release of the framework to create two smaller online shops, learn more about it's possibilities and get familiar with it.
The first project
Our first Commerce 2.x project was gilbert-lodge.com, which we launched last week. It is mainly a porfolio website of an illustrator, but also sells prints of his personal projects. It has only one currency, one free shipping method, no tax calculation and no stock managment or any other complicated feature in terms of commerce. It was the perfect project to get familiar with a lot of the concepts in Commerce 2.x: the new product entity, checkout configuration, customer profiles, etc.
The second one
The webshop of nasire.com had to some extent the same requirements as gilbert-lodge.com. The main difference was that we had multiple variants of one product: the colors. This was a big challange since the display of multilingual product variants was still buggy. We had to fix this temporarily by disabling the Drupal Core page cache and only rely on the dynamic cache.
Upcoming
Our next commerce project will be the relaunch of ensoie.com which is going to involve some features we haven't used in Commerce 2.x such as multiple currencies, stock management, tax calculations, shippping cost calculation, more features for logged in customers. We are looking forward to learn to implement bigger projects with the framework. We will provide a case study once we are done with ensoie.com.
Summary
Commerce 2.x is a very flexible and powerful ecommerce framework and it has all the important ecommerce features in it's core. Creating gilbert-lodge.com took a long time because we first had to figure out how everything works in Commerce 2.x. But the setup, configuration and theming of nasire.com was done in about eight hours and themeing took another 12 hours. This is a huge difference compared to other commerce frameworks and is remarkable since it shows Commerce 2.x can also compete with tools for smaller online shop such as Shopify and Squarespace, while providing all the powerful functionality of the Drupal ecosystem. For clients that have requirements that go beyond commerce functionality, such as a solid CMS, Drupal Commerce 2.x is a good choice.