In the beginning...

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 television.  Being in the business of creating several online stores per year, we searched for a shopping cart solution where we could launch virtually any type of store and be online taking orders quickly.  Our initial requirements were:

• 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 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.
  

After evaluating nearly every shopping cart solution and e-commerce platform on the market and not finding anything to our liking, we began development on a custom solution.  Over a span of two years, the platform evolved to include more features and even greater flexibility, and after industry friends and affiliates started asking if we could host their sites too the decision was made to spin it off as a stand-alone product.  The end result was the first version of Cartooga, a constantly evolving platform that had all of the standard features you'll find on any shopping cart, and unique features you won't find anywhere else.

Ongoing Development.

Normally there is a trade-off between features and ease of use, so the next challenge for the developers was to take all of that flexibility and power and create an easier management system.  Like most online stores, our employees who were actually managing the store weren't web designers or programmers, yet they still needed an easy way to import products and create and edit web pages without having to defer to the web designer for every little change.  Search engine optimization played a big role in how we did business with our own stores, and we wanted to pass that knowledge along to our clients by making it easy for them to write content for their sites.  And since we had more than a few clients under our belt, we had a long list of requests and suggestions to improve the platform from our existing customers.  Taking everything into account, development of the long-awaited "new version", Cartooga 2.0, was underway.  Today, we feel the Cartooga platform sets the standard on how an online store should work.

Real e-commerce experience.

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.  When you create an online store in Cartooga, you're getting more than a rock-solid platform - you're also getting the support of industry veterans who have been doing e-commerce since the mid 90's and have managed everything from simple 5 product websites to multi-million dollar television campaigns.  In the end, we don't want to just host your online store - we want to see you succeed and help your business grow to its maximum potential.

So when we say talk to us, we don't just mean send us technical questions about the platform - our team consists of marketing gurus, business and venture capital consultants, search engine experts, and e-commerce professionals.  We know how to make the web work to our advantage - And once your site is in our platform, the knowledge our professionals bring to the table will help you make it work to yours too.