We've had a bit of a refresh here at Five Simple Steps. We've moved the site from the Drupal content management system (version 6, running Ubercart), over to a simpler system: Shopify. We hope the changes we've made will result in a better experience for you, our customers.

What was the problem with Ubercart & Drupal?

We love Drupal. But, using something as flexible, extensible and as powerful as Ubercart for selling a few books is like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer. We needed something more lean, easier to expand and create content for, without worrying about module compatibility or navigating Drupal 6's muddy waters.

This site now runs on Shopify. It's been a few months in the making, and so far, we're loving the simplicity of Shopify's admin system, the 'apps' you can buy to extend your shop's capabilities. For instance, we're using Fetch to deliver our digital files, Campaign Monitor to pass details into their system for marketing purposes, Metafields for adding additional product meta data, Marketbrain for stats and analytics and a custom app that we had developed for pushing sales every 24 hours to our fulfilment house automatically. All of this didn't require us writing one bit of code.

The theming of Shopify was a breath of fresh air after dealing with the tangled web of Drupal 6 and Ubercart theme files. Shopify completely separates data and presentation allowing you to create a number of templates where you can define all of the HTML produced, and with their theming language, called Liquid, we were up and running in no time.

We've yet to see how Shopify will perform on a busy launch day, or when we're having complex back and forth with orders with a customer, but we're very hopeful that everything will go swimmingly.

Responsive! Ooooh!

The new site's layout responds to the browser width. It's a new fangled practice that we're rather keen on here, and it made sense for us to make this quick change as we made the move over the new system. Now, you'll be able to browse, comment and buy on this site  more easily on small screen and large.

What's next?

Well, there's a lot coming up. We've announced a few books on Twitter and we'll be following them up here on the blog and letting you know more about the status of each book as the author works through the text and we get it into production. We have some other product ideas that we'll be trying out too – you know, just to see what happens. We're pretty excited about them, and hope you will be too.

We're moving to a focus our broadening out our payment options too. We have a new payment gateway that will shortly go online for those of you who don't like Paypal.

Fulfilment is something we're continually working to improve. As our books are generally quite heavy, we know it costs a lot to mail them. We're working hard to find a better fulfilment service, the savings from this new service we'll pass on directly to you.