Overview

The basics

Kartris is an ASP.NET e-commerce application that features a CMS catalog system, shopping cart, payment systems and full administration back end. It is designed to run on a Windows server. We use an MS SQL back end, which is heavily optimized and refined to operate lighting fast even with huge catalogues on high-volume web sites.

The code is available for free under the GPL v2 open source license, or under a low-cost commercial license if you wish to remove visible 'powered-by' links.

3 things Kartris does that your current e-commerce package probably doesn't

Handles HUGE product catalogues of 1,000,000+ items

While many systems can easily handle a few hundred products, very often they have not been designed for, or tested with databases containing hundreds of thousands, or even millions of items. Kartris was developed from the beginning to handle this number of items, with careful consideration given to the database design, indexing and stored procedures. The performance and optimization required to run fast even on huge sites means lightning fast response on much smaller sites.

Search

Search also become far more critical on sites with 10s or 100s of thousands of products. Few customers browse through several levels of categories; instead they search for what they want as they would on Google - with a simple phrase, including the main details.

Most e-commerce packages have simple 'and/or' searches, but with these you either end up with many 'no results' responses (because people have one word in the search that is misspelled or not in any products), or an overwhelming number of results because of a common word in the search phrase which almost every record contains. Worse still, the results are not sorted in any particular order.

The Kartris search is far more sophisticated; it returns 'best match' results, so the results that contain more of the search terms, especially in important fields like the product name, come top.

Allows almost any kind of product interface

Kartris has a range of product types, from single SKU products, multiple version products, products with options and products with combinations. But sometimes, it's impossible to fit your products into these types, and end up with the interface and functionality you want, especially if you need to calculate the product price based on some kind of lookup in a table.

For such occasions, it's possible to build and deploy custom controls. These are standard .NET user controls which can feature whatever interface you desire, and whatever programming logic you require. They can pull configuration from third party databases, lookup pricing or features in an Excel spreadsheet or a web service. Virtually any kind of custom code can be embedded, as long as the control outputs a price, SKU and string of details.

You're no longer tied to fitting your products into the rigid format of an off-the-shelf package.

Custom development

For many, e-commerce has become a commodity. Sites operate similarly, offer the same features, and so on. But you may have very specific requirements which off-the-shelf packages cannot meet. Perhaps you need to integrate with a third party stock system, running nightly or hourly updates? Or maybe you have a product that needs special configuration, and want a particular interface (think about configuring a custom PC or made-to-measure curtains with very specific pricing formulas or lookups)? Only a full source code solution will work in this case.

Unlike typical web developers, we know the base package Kartris better than anyone, because we wrote it and are actively developing it. Unlike most web designers, we have a deep and extensive understanding of every part of the code and as such can make virtually any required modifications to it, or even completely rewrite sections of it.

We provide a number of associated services including hosting, technical support and custom development.

We have developed e-commerce sites for clients across the world, from the UK to US, EU to UAE. Kartris is flexible enough to handle local requirements for taxation and is designed to support unlimited languages.