Expressionengine ecommerce with Cartthrob
Posted by Rob on 09th Apr 2010 in Ecommerce ExpressionEngine
A couple of years ago Brandon Kelly released Fieldframe and revolutionised they way we work with Expressionengine custom fields. Now we have Cartthrob which looks like it may do the same for the way we approach EE+Ecommerce.
As with everything Expressionengine you’re only limited by your imagination and Cartthrob will allow yours to run riot!
Filling the void
Expressionengine has never had a fully featured and publicly available integrated shopping cart addon. It’s native SimpleCommerce module is too basic for many needs, and 3rd party methods like Foxycart have limited appeal, leaving quite a hole in it’s commerce capabilities. Cartthrob is now set to change all that.
What Cartthrob brings to the table is a comprehensive set of tools to build a full product catalogue, with ordering and checkout, using whichever payment gateway you want, and all with the EE flexibility we’re used to.
The Module/Extension and Tags
If you’re used to working with EE extensions you should feel right at home with Cartthrob. The extension its-self is solely a configuration area, since all products and order data can be stored in Weblogs. This means you can set it up, hide the module/extension and let the site owner run the site from the normal Publish/Edit tabs.
There are a lot of template tags and attributes compared to other addons, but Cartthrob needs to be able to do a lot of stuff. Saying that, Cartthrob’s tags are really the icing on the cake because that means total control over presentation and layout - just the way we like it.
The documentation is comprehensive and the developers are planning lots of future enhancements.
As with everything Expressionengine you’re only limited by your imagination and Cartthrob will allow yours to run riot!
What can Cartthrob do? The best bits…
- Uses Weblog entries for product and order data
- Supports product options (using your custom fields)
- Inventory/stock control
- Works with standard EE templates and tags including Fieldframe + Matrix
- Build your own product, cart and checkout templates, build it your way
- Single page or multi page checkout
- Tax and shipping options available
- MSM compatible (the mind boggles!)
- Customer and admin order emails
- Supports digital/password protected goods
- Built in payment gateways or use supplied custom API for your own gateway
The verdict
I’ve been testing Cartthrob out and my early impressions are very good. I had it installed, configured and a bare bones product listing with simple cart and checkout pages up and running on my private test site in less than an hour, not bad at all. It’s certainly a case of exploring a world of possibilities with Cartthrob.
At the time of writing Cartthrob is still in Beta and is only available for EE1.6.5+ with a version for EE2.0 promised for a later date. The $129 site licence (or grab it quickly at the $99 intro price) is quite a bit more than many higher priced addons but when you consider what it’s capable of doing it’s a steal!
Read all about it at http://cartthrob.com/
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