Overview
Overiew
With CartThrob, we’ve built one of the finest cart solutions available for EE. The way we did this was to build a cart that gets away from the whole feature-benefit trap. We call it a trap because it requires you to work within a predefined universe: your options are this, your feature list is this, your box is this. The result is, you can do anything you want…as long as you don’t leave your box.
We approached things differently. We believe the only way to make something you are truly proud of is to make something that is genuinely new, that moves your business forward. So, instead of giving you a set of benefits, we give you the ability to create your own. To define for yourself what is of benefit to you and your clients.
That’s what a focus on tools, instead of features, gets you: if you can think of something your cart needs to do, we can help you make it happen. That’s the CartThrob promise. That’s the reason that, like all great products, you didn’t know you needed CartThrob until you saw it. And once you’ve used it, you will not know how you lived without it.
CartThrob allows you to focus on providing a great and unique shopping experience, as well as a backend that is customized to your complete satisfaction. Harnessing the power of ExpressionEngine to its fullest, CartThrob lets you have complete control.
CartThrob is a unique ecommerce shopping cart system built expressly for the ExpressionEngine cms. CartThrob was built to allow a wide variety of online businesses to quickly and effectively present their customers with a shopping experience that is wholly unique, tailored to the exact needs of their business. ExpressionEngine CMS is incredibly flexible, with few limits on the type of website or the type of content that can be managed. CartThrob, similarly, is built with flexibility, adaptability, growth, and maintenance in mind. Unlike a typical shopping cart, CartThrob makes few assumptions about the structure or nature of your business, it allows you to pick and choose the shopping cart functionality you need to build your online shopping experience with few limits on what you can do.
CartThrob Ecommerce shopping cart is made up of several parts.
- CartThrob Module This provides ExpressionEngine EE template tags to control the front end appearance of your shopping cart.
- CartThrob Extension This controls the shopping cart settings, configuration of payment gateways and shipping plugins
- Payment Gateway & Shipping Plugin System CartThrob has its own plugin system for developing payment & shipping plugins. We provide a common interface for processing payments & working with shipping systems. When your payment gateway or shipping system changes, all you have to do is update your configuration settings.
- Access Points for custom processing Pre-processing, post-processing, on-authorize, on-decline access points are available for additional code to support your unique shopping cart requirements.
Like other ExpressionEngine add-ons, you will complete basic configuration of your store using the CartThrob Configuration extension, and then use the CartThrob template tags within ExpressionEngine’s template system to build your shopping cart. We’ve tried to place few limits on what CartThrob expects of your data, so it can handle just about anything.
Example Uses
CartThrob can be used in many different situations. CartThrob was built to provide a flexible, quick-to-implement, & totally custom shopping carts that work well with the rest of your system. With little more than CartThrob’s default shopping cart templates you can do the following:
- Create a non-profit donation site. Many donation sites would like to give the option to take any denomination. With CartThrob, you could provide a simple text input field to allow the user to pick any amount of money to donate.
- Provide product sales, forums, and a wiki, with one common membership system. ExpressionEngine manages everything, without the need for software bridging.
- Build a shopping cart for a very limited number of products. Many software sites only have a few products. You don’t need a complex shopping cart for that. You can hardcode items into your templates if your site only has a few products. You can have a working cart built and tested in a couple hours.
- Integrate with a third-party shipping company. Many sites take money, and then send a list of products to a drop-ship distributor. Typical shopping carts make it difficult to integrate with a third party after a sale has been made. CartThrob provides several access points for integration with external systems.
- Create a cart for products that have many different configuration options. Because you can store products as blog entries, or as hard-coded data in your templates, you can do just about anything. Each product could have 200 different configuration options… CartThrob can handle it, because ExpressionEngine can handle it.
- Sell wildly different products. Do you take donations, sell products, services, and software all on the same site? CartThrob can handle it.
The power of ExpressionEngine makes it easy to build the front end of a site with all of the features you could dream of; categories, cross-sales, upgrades, configuration options, multiple product types, reviews, and password protected content. EE Handles the content, CartThrob handles the sale. It’s as simple as that.
Why is CartThrob so great?
CartThrob piggybacks on ExpressionEngine, so whatever ExpressionEngine can do, so can CartThrob shopping cart. A site with CartThrob can provide any of the following and more:
- Integrated forums
- Blogs with user commenting
- Different pricing levels for each membership level
- Password protected content & downloads
- Product categories
- Coupons
- Dynamic, configurable products
- Wiki with membership
- Donations
- Want Ads (purchaseable blog entries)
- Classifieds (purchaseable blog entries)
- Cross-selling and upgrades
- Related content & product links
- Multiple payment systems
- Third party systems integration
- Multiple shipping systems
- Multiple stores (MSM compatible)
- Multi-language shopping carts
- Security. CartThrob can be as secure as you need it to be. When you use blog entries to store product data, CartThrob provides multiple validation checks to make sure the final price is correct
- Free products
- Customer notification
- Shopowner notification
- Order history
- Customer Account Management
CartThrob is an ideal product for:
- Shopowners with access to an EE developer
- EE, HTML developers
- PHP developers
- A store owner that has content to manage, products to sell, and forums to run.
CartThrob is not an ideal product for:
- A membership site that needs to do recurrent rebilling at regular intervals. We’re building a membership add-on, but it’s not ready yet.
- A store owner that needs tight integration with Quickbooks, or Quickbooks Point of Sale. (we’ll be working with a third party to provide an option for integration with these accounting systems in the future)
- A store owner that needs a point and click install, configuration and setup. Building a CartThrob based store requires template development, just like any ExpressionEngine site.
- Someone that wants every feature available in OSCommerce or X-Cart out of the box.
- A website without an installed copy of ExpressionEngine. CartThrob only works with EE
