What does Commerce Guys do and how do you work with Drupal?

Our main focus is providing clients with great integration between Drupal and Ubercart. Along with this, we also help our clients with general business advice on things like how to market products well on a website, identifying their target markets, and reaching those markets effectively. Our clients sell a variety of good and services from physical products to file downloads and premium content access. We help each individual client figure out how to set up a Drupal ecommerce site that works best for their business.

What led you to get involved in the Ubercart project and what has your experience been?

Our company was founded around the need for better support for ecommerce on Drupal sites. We discovered Ubercart while researching shopping cart solutions for a client almost three years ago. We were amazed at what could be done with the combination of a great content management system and a tightly integrated shopping cart. Ubercart has been a really great system of modules to work with. The forums at Ubercart.org are unlike anything I have seen in the shopping cart/ecommerce arena, and working with an active community is really helpful (as everyone from the Drupal community knows well).

We know you're doing a big Ubercart training in Chicago in May. What should we know about it?*

We have been trying to get the ball rolling with Ubercart training for some time now. Ubercart is well represented at DrupalCons and Drupal Camps, however you can't really get enough information in those 60 minute sessions to understand the whole scope of what needs to happen to build an Ubercart store with Drupal. We got great feedback from our Germany Ubercart training we did last month with Joeri Poesen from af83, so we decided to extend our training to three days and also involve the Ubercart lead maintainer Ryan Szrama. We are limiting enrollment to 16 people with 4 presenters to allow for what we think will be a really great learning environment. The training is geared towards Drupal power users and companies using Drupal who are interested in learning how to sell their products, content, and events. We don't get into code at all other than showing some quick examples. More details can be found here.

What is the status of the Drupal online store you're working on with the Drupal Association?*

We were selected by the Drupal Association to put together an ecommerce site selling Drupal branded merchandise to benefit the Drupal Association. It has been going a little slower than we would have liked – we have to work around the Drupal.org redesign because of the changes in the actual Drupal branding. We now have the new artwork from Mark Boulton and are getting samples for goods before making big purchases to stock the store. We are also setting up contracts with publishers to sell most of the Drupal books. We can't wait to help spread the Drupal brand and raise money for the Drupal Association. Look for the swag store to open later this spring.

What are you most looking forward to at DrupalCon DC?

DrupalCon DC will be the biggest ever and we think it will be a great time to meet people will all kinds of different experience in the Drupal community. We are looking forward to meeting potential clients, and we'll also be keeping our eye out for potential new employees. (We're hiring!) I'm particularly excited to watch Ryan try to present all of Ubercart in 45 minutes and then take questions from 300-400 people in the room. :) We are also having an Uberdinner sometime during the week that should be both fun and productive.