Before diving into a Drupal Commerce project, you must reconcile the product model and business rules of your merchant with the data model and processes of the framework. Thanks to its dependence on Drupal's entity system, Views, and Rules, Drupal Commerce is flexible enough to accommodate most requirements with little custom development required. However, to get the most out of the system, you must understand how it's using these systems and where it expects different types of data for products, transactions, etc. to reside.

This session will examine the entity types defined by Drupal Commerce, their relationships, and their methods of creation to give you a high level understanding of the Drupal Commerce architecture. Through a series of real world examples, we'll walk through the architecting process for some of the product and business models listed below:

Simple product sales
Products with attributes
Customizable products
Variable priced products (i.e. donations)
Crowd funding portals
Multi-seller marketplaces
Manual eBay synchronization
Invoice payment with no cart
Subscription products with recurring payment

The architecture of Drupal Commerce isn't set in stone, and in fact we've already prepared a roadmap that includes a new Store entity type and changes to the product data model (among other things) that will change how you architect your future sites. We'll review the high points of the roadmap and demonstrate how the previous examples might be created more easily and efficiently in the next version of Drupal Commerce.