A Case Study of http://shop.usafa.org, the theme, the modules used, and Some great customizations that allow us to do more than used to be possible with our previous e-commerce web application.

The best stuff is in a custom panel that integrates with the checkout process, and does some Magic with our proprietary "Raisers Edge" database.

These are my notes from the session-forgive the speed at which they were taken. At the bottom of the notes are four short YouTube videos that I took during the presentation. The sound isn't great, but you should still be able to hear the discussion.

Rachel and Matt started out by explaining the old cart system that they were using. The cart didn't serve the needs of the USAFA at all. This left them needing a new store that would be easy to change, update, and adding items to the catalog. They decided that Ubercart was the right direction to go.

It was decided that they would views instead of the catalog. By using a taxonomy argument, they could tag items as a gift and it would show automatically in the gifts section of the site. It also allowed for an easy methodology for changing categories and prices.

They used imagecache to deal with multiple sizes of the images for the catalog.

They also wanted to be able to change out the look and feel of the system quickly and easily. This was a compelling reason to use Drupal.

One challenge was integration with the legacy system that was not login friendly. They decided to avoid logins completely. Upon checkout, the user had to put a user id for discounts. They built a little form that would allow the user to retrieve the id by entering in name, address, zip and so forth.

The system is up and running now and they experienced an increase of 60% in online sales. Management was very pleased. 90% of the functionality was out of the box Drupal and Ubercart.

Ultimately they would like to create a Point of Sale system to hook into Ubercart and integrate fedex shipping labels into the system.

Thanks to Rachel @rdixon2005 and Matt @vordude for sharing their experience.