Choosing an e-commerce solution can be a tough and costly choice.

Ubercart, a popular e-commerce module for Drupal, could be the perfect fit.

1. SEO

The first goal for your e-commerce site should always be getting people through the door. Having a high search ranking on google is a necessity. Fortunately Drupal's SEO tools, a main selling point of the CMS, are intuitive and quick to manage.

Enabling search engine friendly, clean urls takes 5 seconds. If you want to fine tune the paths to better suit each category or product, the paths and pathauto modules give you full control without becoming a time sink.

SEO with drupal gets even simpler when the system generates a sitemap for you and submits it to the major search engines whenever you add a product or change the site.

For more information on Drupal SEO, see 'A guide to SEO in Drupal'.

2. The All-in-One site

Surely a pure e-commerce solution like osCommerce is better than a jack-of-all trades solution like Drupal? Actually the answer is not as obvious as you would expect. Modern sites do more then just provide shopping functionality. Store owners may want product reviews, blogging, news posts, social media integration and many other features. Adding this functionality to a system that is fairly closed can be costly and time consuming.

If I want to add coupons to my store, for example, I can just download and install the community made module quickly and easily.

Integrating your store into the rest of your site strengthens your brand and improves the usability of your site, visitors won't have the jarring experience of your store section opening in a new page, with an inconsistent look and feel to the rest of your site.

3. Huge Community Support

We've already talked a lot about modules as they form the basis of Drupals flexibility and extensibility. Ubercart really benefits from the large community surrounding it, with several paid, full-time developers and almost 7000 members on ubercart.org, support is speedy, add-ons with extra functionality are being developed constantly and if you need some custom code written, help is never far away.

4. User Friendly

A great deal of focus has been spent on the user interface for Ubercart, for the customer and the store owner. One of the most important aspects is the checkout process, where it's been shown that as much at 70% of your customers can leave the site before completing the purchase. The checkout process has been optimised and improved in many ubercart themes, increasing conversion rates.

Other user friendly features include amazon style one click ordering, customisable filters, sorts and advanced searching.

Ubercart provides full analytics and reports for store owners with full stock control and product classes, allowing easy organisation of different categories and products.

5. Scalable

When everything goes to plan, your site traffic explodes from the hundreds to the thousands, the last thing on your mind is whether your system is taking the strain of all these extra buyers. Another great selling point of Drupal is how well it scales.

Any modules that aren't being used can be completely uninstalled, removing all redundant code from the system.

Drupal's built in caching and file aggregation features are simple and powerful. Using this site as an example, on launch, we spent several minutes configuring the performance settings and our site instantly scored an A grade with Yahoo's Yslow tool.

With the many e-commerce options out there, it ultimately comes down to which solution best fits your project requirements.

Drupal, extended by ubercart, is a solid and robust solution that can give your site the flexibility you need.