Cartooga is more than just a shopping cart.

Most e-commerce sites are more than just an online store - they're your entire company presence.  You want to talk about your business, how long you've been around, what got you started, how many employees you have, etc.  The more information you provide about yourself, the more comfortable customers will feel spending their money with you vs. any of the other thousands of online retailers out there selling similar products.

So why would you limit yourself to an e-commerce platform where you can only make a handful of web pages that have nothing to do with the cart itself?  With Cartooga, you can create pages from scratch that immediately and automatically fit into your site without knowing a single line of HTML.  You literally just start typing as if you were writing a Word document, save it, and it's up as a web page.

Why should I host my store with you instead of just buying a shopping cart?

This is one of the most common questions we're asked, and the answer can get pretty technical.  So why wouldn't owning your shopping cart be preferable to "renting" space on our server on a month to month basis?  Because technology changes faster than you do!

To be perfectly honest, I can't say that there are no good reasons to own your own cart vs. using a hosted solution like ours.  For example if you're the type of person who knows how to code and wants to alter the platform you start with to perform a specific function, purchasing one of the many available shopping carts out there and modifying it to fit your needs might be a better way to go.  But for the majority of online stores, ownership isn't all it's cracked up to be.  Here's why:

1. You still have to pay for web hosting.  Since all carts are database-driven, which is more expensive than your basic $9.95 hosting plans, generally you're going to be paying about as much as it costs for us to host your store anyway.
   
   
2. You have to install and configure it yourself.  Your web hosting company isn't going to help you configure a shopping cart unless they're the ones who sold it to you.  You'll need to create the database, get your products in, customize the look and feel of your store, and troubleshoot it yourself.  Or pay someone to do it for you.
   
   
3. You have to install your own updates.  When a stand-alone shopping cart releases a new feature, fixes a bug, or releases a critical update you have to install these updates yourself.  These kinds of changes require swapping out pages, going into the database and altering tables, etc.  And if you've done any customization to your cart from its original format, those changes you made might prohibit the updates from working properly.
   
   
4. Is it going to work with your... The hunt for the right shopping cart can be as time consuming as setting it up.  Just when you think you've found the perfect cart, that looks the way you want and has all of the features you need, you discover it's written in a different language than your hosting company supports, or can't automatically calculate shipping charges or integrate with Quickbooks.
   
   
5. Is it really that flexible?  A good programmer can make anything happen, but does ownership of the code outweigh the long-term cost of employing that programmer?  Every programmer has their own coding style, and there are varying levels of ability.  How often do you come across a developer who's an expert at writing code, designing efficient databases, creating an attractive website, and familiar with how to optimize for search engines?  Those guys aren't cheap - and if you're lucky enough to find one, he's probably going to want to write your cart from scratch, not purchase something over the counter and modify it.
   

With Cartooga, you don't have to worry about any of that.  Our system lets you focus on your primary goal - get your products up, make your site look cool, and start selling!  Our engineers keep our platform up to date with all of the latest enhancements without you having to do anything on your end and our resident design and SEO experts make sure that all of the layouts we offer are clean, easy to navigate, and easy for the search engines to index your content.

Remember, we didn't create Cartooga just to start selling e-commerce sites.  We created it because we also run online stores, selling everything from infomercial products to luxury goods to wine and coffee, and all of our sites greatly vary in design and functionality requirements.  Plus we're constantly coming up with new ideas.  After evaluating nearly every e-commerce platform and shopping cart on the web we invested the time and resources to create our own, which would handle any type of store no matter what we were selling.  The end result is the Cartooga platform, and we know your online store will benefit from it like ours did. 

In the end, we aren't just interested in hosting your store - we want to see you succeed and run a successful web business.