Why we love Craft Commerce

As well as being an amazing Content Management System (CMS) - Craft also can be a powerful eCommerce platform. We’ve used many in the past such as Cart Throb (EE), Magento, Shopify etc. But we’ve found that Craft Commerce can perform better than all of these when you use it correctly.

Craft Commerce is super flexible, allowing you to run a basic click & buy shop, right up to a full enterprise store with enhanced features. So we thought it would be good to break down the features we like and what we’ve added to Craft Commerce

Variants

Most eCommerce platforms come with variants, but not as powerful as Craft Commerce. Variants are different options a user can choose when buying a product e.g. Size, Colour, Weight etc. Normally your limited to Size & Colour, but with Craft Commerce you can extend this to be whatever you like, and add more data if you need.
E.g. A variant could have an image of that particular colour / size attached to it, as well as stock levels.

Cart Abandonment

From a shop owners point of view, having the ability to view who has abandoned their cart is important. You can see which products people are interested in and also remind them to come back to the shop to complete their purchase. Craft Commerce comes with this in it’s core, and also has the ability to see ‘Active’ carts so you can see who is currently on the site and what they are buying.

Shipping

Craft Commerce (From our point of view) has the most flexible shipping systems available by giving shop owners full control other their shipping regions and methods.
Shipping methods (E.g. Free Shipping, Next Day Shipping etc) are created, but can each have their own set of rules. So if you only wanted Free Shipping available to customers in the UK over £10.00 you can do that, and also still have Free Shipping for customers in the US over £100.

Promotions

Normally discounted products (Especially in Shopify) are adjusted on a ‘per product’ basis. E.g. If you had 20 products that were on sale by 10%, you would have to manually edit each product’s price. Not in Craft Commerce! You can create a ‘Promotion’ and apply that to a set of products / or category of products and set how long that promotion should run for. Saving you many hours of admin work.

Order Management Workflow

When a new order comes in you can track and update the progress of that order, giving you a visual break down of where products are at in the fulfilment process. Your customers also can see the history (E.g. Processing > Picked > Shipped > Delivered) of their order and it also emails the customer whenever the status changes, keeping them in the loop.

You can also print off invoices / shipping labels making it easier to package your products

API / Integrations

Even though we feel Craft Commerce is solid enough to use straight out of the box, we’ve realised that some clients may want to extend this functionality, or even link up with a 3rd Party piece of software. Craft Commerce’s API allows us to do this no problem. So if you want to link up with a 3rd Party delivery service, this wouldn’t be a problem (In fact, we’re already working on this - Watch this space!)

Support

A big selling point of Craft Commerce is that it comes with support within the price you pay for the commercial add-on. This not only makes our developers feel better knowing that *IF* there is a problem, we have a helping hand. But also our clients know that problems are fixable quickly.

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For more information on Craft Commerce check out their features and if you have an eCommerce / Shop website in mind and are thinking of going ahead, fill out our project planner to get started.

We recently created a video walkthrough to help show you just how good Craft Commerce is to use, highlighting some of its standout features and its intuitive usability. Take a look below!