Drupal and XCart. Sharing users

Question

I've just finished skinning an xcart for a client and he has dropped me an email letting me know that he has been speaking to an iPhone dev company who are going to build a social networking app on top of Drupal for him.

He wants to know if xcart will be able to share data from Drupal and vice versa. In particular, they want a registration on one platform to be accessible by the other, this could also go so far as either site accessing information about shopping habits or social interactions to push features/products of the other system etc

This is my first time touching xcart and I have zero experience with Drupal, however, I have done a little research and I've seen there is an ecommerce module for Drupal. As the xcart system is not live (and is now on hold until the app has launched), would it be quicker, easier, cheaper (in dev hours) and more future proof to scrap what we have already done with xcart and just re-skin the store on the Drupal ecommerce module?

Answer 1

I took a look at xcart and it seems like just another similar shopping cart as zencart/similar spaghetti code. It's fine if all what you need is there, but if you need to extend or modify existing behavior, it will become a nightmare.

You should go with Drupal for several reasons:

1. Less headaches - you need only to learn Drupal, not both systems
2. Drupal will offer most of the options you will need; both Ubercart and Commerce have plenty of features so I doubt you will miss something
3. You don't have xcart ready yet so it will be "cheaper" to leave it now and switch to Drupal
4. Integrating 3 systems vs integrating 2 is still a huge difference, especially as you aren't skilled with either xcart or Drupal

I don't know the exact requirements of your shop, but I'd say to go with Ubercart first and see if it fits you. It's much easier to understand for first time users, has mature community and many additional modules which offer extra functionality.

Commerce is mainly for people who have a lot of experience with Drupal and understand main concepts. Everything there is lifted into another "layer" of abstraction which will be hard to understand for a new programmer. Also, often you might find yourself in a situation where you have to get your hands dirty and debug with other modules, and it might be a pain and take too much time.