Drupal Commerce Blog

Shipping Requirements Have Changed

Heretofore, shipping has focused on exposing a simple yet effective API for connecting rating and shipping companies to the checkout process. Many stores eschew real-time rating and instead opt to offer flat-rate shipping or free shipping on orders. This entirely removes the need for rating. For those who do use real-time rating, the existing process offers a simple set of tools that are only adequate for simple shipping needs.

When working on a Commerce project which uses a payment gateway, you need to always make sure that your Staging and Development environments are properly targeting the sandbox or test mode of your payment gateway, and that your Production site is targeting the live account.

This is actually true for any third-party service integration which provides a sandbox where you can test. The objective is to make sure you never send test data on a live account, no matter the service you're testing on.

For this tutorial, I will focus on payment method settings, but the principle remains the same for any other third-party integration.

I will start from an empty Drupal site hosted on Platform.sh and go through the following steps:

• Enable and configure Paypal WPS payment method
• Export its configuration to a settings.local.php file
• Override its Sandbox configuration on the Staging environment
• Write custom code to read the configuration from the settings.local.php

As you see, the goal (as always with Drupal) is to read the configuration from your code so that you can easily switch from a sandbox mode to a live mode.

"Why doesn’t Commerce/Magento/$otherSolution handle my taxes properly? That’s the most basic feature!” - many people, often.

When it comes to eCommerce, nobody likes taxes. We expect taxes to “just work”, so we can finish our projects and get on with our lives. At the same time, no other topic is as complex.

Selling online puts us at the crossroads of different (and sometimes conflicting) laws with many rules and even more exceptions. All eCommerce systems provide the basic tools (“Define your tax rates and specify when to apply them”) and make the site developer responsible for tax compliance. The developer usually passes that responsibility to the client, sometimes implicitly. The client consults an accountant, sometimes. But the buck has to stop somewhere, and it often comes back to the developer, 5 days after launch.

As taxes become more and more complex, there is a need for smarter tax handling, where the application does more and the site administrator less. In the Commerce 1.x lifecycle we’ve built the commerce_vat module to handle the more and more complex VAT taxes. For 2.x, we’re bringing this approach back into core, and releasing several libraries to share the solution with the wider PHP community.

Read more...

Thanks to the work of the Drupal security team, we released Drupal Commerce 7.x-1.10 on September 10 to address an information disclosure vulnerability. Last week we released a companion module to that update, Commerce Username Update, to help administrators manage the username update the release requires. The new version also includes a handful of minor bug fixes and a new feature to better support free order notifications on the checkout form.

Read more to learn more about the patched vulnerability and new feature.