Getting Started with Drupal Commerce: Learn everything you need to know in order to get your first Drupal Commerce website set up and trading

A product represents an item for sale on your website. It can be a physical product such as a book, or a virtual product, such as a digital download or event. You can add fields to your product to represent different elements—for example color, size or, in the case of an event, a date.

You can also define multiple types of products each with different fields to best categorize the products within your store.

In Drupal Commerce, the order entity is used to represent a customer order in any state. The moment the customer adds something to their shopping cart, a new order is created. As with products, an order can be extended with different fields to hold custom information about an order.

You can define multiple order types if your business requires a distinction between them—for example, a stock order and a subscription order.

An order is made up of one or more Line items. A line item associates a product with an order.

By default, a line item will only contain a product reference (that is, a pointer to an actual product), and quantity. Line items can be extended with additional fields allowing you to collect more specific information. You could extend this, for example, to create a personalized gift message for an order line.

You can define multiple line item types, for example, for customizable and non-customizable products.

A customer profile is used to store the personal details of your customer. An order will generally be associated with one or more Customer profiles—typically one for the invoice address and one for the shipping address.

You can extend the customer profile with additional fields if you want to collect more information from the customer. Typical uses for this might include a telephone number, special delivery instructions, and so on.

You can define different Customer profile types allowing you to collect different information for billing and shipping, for example.

If you have integrated your store with a payment gateway, the gateway module will create one or more payment transactions and associate them with your order. The contents of these vary depending on the payment gateway implementation, but typically will include the payment details and response from the card payment provider to the request for payment.

We will discuss how to use these concepts in a lot more detail in Chapter 3, Planning Your Store.

The Views module (http://drupal.org/project/views) is used extensively throughout Drupal Commerce for almost all the administration screens and shopping cart / checkout. The fact that almost everything in Drupal Commerce is powered by Views makes it very easy to modify the shopping experience for both the customer and store owner without the need for coding.

The Rules module (http://drupal.org/project/rules) is used in many contexts throughout Drupal Commerce including for the calculation of prices and taxes. Rules is a very flexible and extensible system and provides many options for implementing the rules of your business.

The Entity module (http://drupal.org/project/entity) allows much greater access to the entity data that makes up the Commerce system. This will be of great benefit if you start to develop more comprehensive sites using Rules and particularly if you plan to write your own Drupal Commerce modules.

Instead of defining its own Address field standard, Drupal Commerce utilizes the Address Field module (http://drupal.org/project/addressfield), which uses international standard address formats (xNAL) to ensure that all countries' address standards are supported.

The Chaos Tools (Ctools) module (http://drupal.org/project/ctools) is a utility module that allows Drupal Commerce to implement a common pluggable architecture.

The Token module (http://drupal.org/project/token) provides text placeholders that represent (and are expanded into) entity properties or fields depending on the context of where the token is used. For example, when visiting a user's profile page, the token [user], would represent the user's unique ID (uid) and within the context of an actual item of content such as a page,[author] might expand to the author of the post, that is also the uid property of the item of content.

The Pathauto module (http://drupal.org/project/pathauto) automatically generates URL/path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, taxonomy terms, and users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias.