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Origins
The Cartooga platform was originally developed as an in-house solution for a group of web-savy investors who specialized in online retail and direct response. Being in the business of creating several online stores per year, the need existed to create a shopping cart solution where we could launch virtually any type of store and be online taking orders quickly without having to re-invent the wheel every time. The initial criteria was simple:
- It had to be flexible enough to handle any type of product.
- The code and hosting had to be centralized, not copied and re-used per store.
- It had to be able to handle any sized store - whether it's a one product site or a 10,000 product site
- It had to be completely customizable visually, so stores could look completely different from each other even though they're all running from the same code.
- It had to be search engine friendly.
- It had to be able to handle complex promotions (Buy two of Product A and receive one of Product B free, etc.).
- It had to be able to toggle between real-time shipping quotes, flat rate per store, flat rate per item, or a combination of them all.
- It had to have user-level security on the administration side, since the people processing and shipping the orders should not necessarily be able to edit the products and prices.
Naturally we couldn't just purchase any off the shelf shopping cart and attempt to modify it to suit our needs - this was too big of a project and had to be built from scratch. So we hired a team of cheap foreign programmers and six hours later we had the solution we were looking for. Just kidding... Cartooga was made in America by Americans and it took nearly two years to fully develop and test. Over time the platform evolved to include more features and greater flexibility, and eventually the decision was made to spin it off as a stand-alone product. The end result is a constantly evolving platform that has most of the standard features you'll find on any shopping cart and unique features that you won't find anywhere else.
Whether you're a novice when it comes to building websites or a nerd who dreams in code, Cartooga offers the most flexible, powerful, and most customizable solution on the market.
Management Team
Ron Rule, President
A seasoned programmer, SQL DBA, and web entrepreneur, Ron started his first company 13 years ago offering web hosting and development from a small office in Clearwater, FL. With projects ranging from Palm applications to streaming video, over four years the company grew from a one-man operation to more than $3 Million in revenue and was acquired by a larger firm in 2001.
Staying in the web hosting sector, he founded in 2002, dealing strictly with the reseller market. evolved to become a leader in the reseller hosting market. The product line was expanded to include a web analytics service that complimented the hosting packages, a retail-box version known as "Web Hosting in a Box", which sold in CompUSA stores, and the ProServer line which were physical servers designed for web hosting companies and pre-configured with a hosting control panel. As time went on and the web hosting market became more and more saturated, he began to look for an exit and eventually spun off the product lines into separate companies and sold them individually.
Anticipating that the web analytics market was the next area for growth on the web, he formed in 2005, a stand-alone version of the former analytics package. was rated among the top ten hosted analytics services in 2006, along side analytics-leaders and (now ). During this time he also worked as a consultant for a group of investment bankers with a focus on raising venture capital for Internet startups.
Having watched the evolution of e-commerce over the preceding 12 years, he envisioned a new type of e-commerce solution that would ultimately replace traditional shopping carts. In the summer of 2008 Ron returned to his sales and programming roots and began development on what is now the Cartooga platform.
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Ryan Ford, Sales Manager
Ryan brings a wealth of knowledge to the team and is an entrepreneur at heart. His business experience started with a small local business and quickly expanded with involvement in much larger and more dynamic business structures. His passion for creating a base of opportunity, molding it to fit growth potential, and maximizing return is the basis for his dedicated involvement with every organization he's a part of. Ryan's knowledge concerning the internal dynamics of the business world, exceptional human-relations skills, and a strong sense of ethics carry have been developed through interaction with virtually all aspects of internet function.
From design, hosting, promotion, SEO, advertising campaigns and sales & marketing, to the intricate financial aspects of e-commerce including merchant banking & shopping cart implementation, his experience in finding solutions and facilitating applications make his role in Cartooga a central lifeline to success.
Corey Westfall, Graphics Guru
Corey heads up our design team and is responsible for most of the fantastic-looking sites you see hosted on the Cartooga platform.
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So what gave you this idea anyway? From the desk of the founder...
"I thought back to my first job as a kid right out of high school, selling advertising on the back of drug store receipts. And let me tell you something - nobody wants to buy advertising on the back of a drug store receipt. After striking out every day of my first week, I'm standing in a pizza shop giving my pitch to the owner and he tells me the same thing everyone else had been telling me: "It's not worth the money, nobody reads those things". How could I argue with him? It was a relatively new concept at the time, there was no track record, no great success stories of small pizza shop owners becoming multi-millionaires claiming they owe it all to drug store receipts.
So as I made my way to the door, striking out yet again, an idea hit me and I stopped. I said to the owner "I'll tell you what, I'll run an ad for you for free if you let me write it." Somewhat dismissively, he says "Sure kid, whatever you wanna do.", so I sit down and start reading out loud as I write "Buy one pizza, get ten free" and all of a sudden I have his attention. He says "What are you doing? You're gonna put me out of business with that!".
And I said "Nah, nobody reads these things."
After what seemed like an eternity of silence, he smiles and says "Ok kid, show me what you've got" and I ended up getting my first sale that day. The moment didn't seem that significant when it happened, but it taught me that no matter what you're selling there are certain triggers that will switch your customer's thinking, and if you know how to use them effectively you can sell anything to anyone. With the explosion in e-commerce over the last decade, businesses were still struggling to adapt that philosophy to their websites. Selling products online is like having a store in the largest mall in the world - millions of potential customers are out there, but what are the odds they're going to come into YOUR store, or even know about it with so much surrounding competition?
Cartooga was designed to help break that barrier, with a search-engine-friendly platform that's conducive to good natural results, feed generators that help you get your products in top marketplaces with minimal effort, and a sales & promotions engine that automatically recommends products to buyers based on established shopping patterns. In other words, we know how to get people to your website and spend money when they get there. Afterall, you found us, didn't you? And when your store grows to the point where you can't handle shipping the orders, our fulfillment center can handle that for you too. Cartooga handles it all, whether you're a small store with a handful of products or a larger store with thousands of them, you won't find a shopping cart platform like ours anywhere else."
-- Ron Rule, President
Cartooga, LLC
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