Drupal: the Best Choice for Creating a Social Shopping Website

Posted by Julia Bel on June 19th, 2017

Social shopping is the latest trend in the ecommerce web development field. It is a mix of two broad areas: social media and online shopping. The idea is to let people surf online for items they want to purchase together with their Facebook friends, exchanging opinions, commenting, and boasting new things they have bought.

Now, it is not enough just to have links to the social media on your site. Social shopping suggests a much deeper level of interaction that users should have with a website. Therefore, the importance of choosing a platform for building a social shopping project cannot be overestimated. The most essential characteristics that the platform must have is its ability to work with a great number of users and shopping items, flexibility, and, finally, seamless integration with payment systems. Among other options, Drupal fits this description best of all.

A great example of a social shopping website created with the use of Drupal is chiq.com. First of all, it is wonderfully integrated with Facebook. Programmers have developed custom algorithms and modules, which allow users to see products on their dashboards ranked by the number of likes on their Facebook pages, create Facebook photo albums, and do many other things. From their FB page, people come to the website and are then taken on to the pages where they can actually buy whatever they wish.

chiq.com excels at performance too. The developers decided to do without Drupal modules with a great weight on dashboards (Ctools,Views, Panels, etc.) and employed a specially configured server to tackle the load. Also, they didn't touch the Drupal core. Instead, they used cache and session layers for Drupal, as well as an ordinary database. Also, they employed CDN for content storage, and incomplete DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP functionality. Finally, they designed their own unique caching algorithm.

As for payment systems, chiq.com effectively uses the authorize.net payment platform thanks to the integration capabilities of Drupal.

There are many other interesting features implemented on chiq.com by the Drupal development company that created it like an automatic item aggregator. All that shows how flexible and powerful Drupal web development can be.