About a year ago I reviewed various shopping cart platforms for what was to be an “upcoming” project. After numerous delays and client hand holding (with the requisite back and forth) one year later that project finally began. And, as has lately become a trend in my professional life, the client’s spec combined with a drastically shortened and accelerated deadline forced us to go with something completely unknown and with only cursory inspection; the 3rd party e-commerce ExpressionEngine module CartThrob 2.0 (beta at the time of this review BTW).

Of course this presented the problem of actually using an unknown package to build a site with. Thankfully though, while CartThrob has a steep learning curve and is most certainly missing key functionality,  it’s an overall nice package that allowed us to do what we needed. Sure, there’s pain involved (lots of configuration, testing and set up) but with a little elbow grease it all worked out.

As mentioned, CartThrob is an ExpressionEngine module for managing an online store. It’s available for both ExpressionEngine branches (1.x and 2.x) and was voted Module of the Year by Devot:ee in 2010 (for the 1.x version only). This being an ExpressionEngine project CartThrob would, in theory, be a nice fit.

One of the really nice things about using CartThrob is that it uses the ExpressionEngine admin panel for managing your store. This meant there wouldn’t be a second administration site that the client would have to learn. (Personally, I always found dual admins to be janky at best and sloppy/lazy at worst so this was a definite bonus in favor CartThrob.)

But this is also double edged because, well, pretty much everything about your store is saved into the entries system within ExpressionEngine. This, of course, causes your Entries panel to become an eye sore whenever you have to do anything there. Instead of having a dedicated section to manage products you use the Entries section. Instead of a dedicated section to manage your orders you use the Entries section. Instead of a dedicated section to manage… well, you get the idea; everything is managed through the entries. This makes sense for the product management but when you have to dig through entries to find orders and coupons and discounts (etc) things get a little jarring for some people (even internally with my team) so it’s a concern.

Still, single freaking admin so it was kind of a lesser evil compromise.

The unusual thing though is that, for how thoroughly the management of items was punted (though, to be fair, it looks to be a feature versus bug debate more than “punting”), CartThrob has an extremely deep configuration section where you can customize CartThrob to function just right. CartThrob has all the basic customization functionality one would expect from any modern shopping cart platform (tax, shipping, payments with lots of merchant options, etc) plus a bunch of settings just to get CartThrob working (CartThrob is NOT an out of the box solution). It’s all presented in an easy to use interface that’s designed to mesh with the ExpressionEngine administration panel design which makes for an easier experience.

As far as merchant accounts go (for accepting payments through your site) there’s the usual suspects of Authorize.net, Paypal and SagePay built right in but also some offline solutions for pay by check and credit accounts. For this project we used Authorize.net which went smooth for the most part but I can’t speak for the other options though if they’re anything like the Authorize.net one they’re probably cool. CartThrob also includes some extensions and hooks so writing your own payment gateway is possible if you need.

CartThrob can also hook into the ExpressionEngine member module so your customers can be registered internally. Like pretty much everything else with CartThrob there’s a bit of configuration involved to get it up and working though. Unfortunately though, there’s not really any out of the box functionality for your members to take advantage of. For example, there isn’t any way for your customers to view their past orders when logged in and when using the control panel and viewing a member’s profile there’s no relationship with CartThrob. You’re gonna have to write all that stuff yourself but, and I don’t know why, but CartThrob doesn’t store any relationships between ExpressionEngine members and it’s customers so expect a challenge.

In terms of the user side, the actual storefront, everything is done using ExpressionEngine templates and template tags. There are lots of module methods available and even though it’s far from a complete package of the expected functionality. In fact, on our team, we got into a habit of thinking of CartThrob as a Lego set for creating what we want instead of having what we want already.

For example, to view the details about a users cart you’d use the template code below:

{exp:cartthrob:cart_info}
	{total_items} 
	{total_unique_items} 
	{cart_entry_ids} 
	{cart_shipping} 
	{cart_tax_rate} 
	{cart_tax} 
	{cart_subtotal} 
	{cart_total} 
{/exp:cartthrob:cart_info}

On the surface this appears to be nice because it keeps things within the core ExpressionEngine development process. And it would be except, well, CartThrob isn’t abstract enough. Too many times I would try to do something that seemed obvious, like checking for shippable items within a users cart, and would come up short; that functionality doesn’t exist.

Still though, don’t get me wrong. Yes, some of the above sucks. Absolutely. But CartThrob is still under development. Plus, since it’s a commercial script ($99) there’s financial incentive to improve it. And, truth be told, for as painful as certain points were it’s still way more fun to build a site with CartThrob than most of the other options I’ve used or reviewed like OpenCart or Avactis.

Plus, again, single freaking admin!