Frequently Asked Questions
Is Kartris 'open source'?
Kartris is partially open source. There is a compiled closed source core, but with a wrapper of open source code. The philosophy is to enable users to have access to the source code they are most likely to wish to modify (payment gateways, skins and many user controls, language packs) whilst protecting the core code. Full source code can be made available to developers in some circumstances (contact us for details).
Why isn't Kartris 'open source'?
There are 2 main reasons. Firstly, it costs money to produce good software and to support it. Whilst there are pure open source business models that some exploit successfully, these have worked best for products where the contributors are motivated by a sense of social activism. The nature of ecommerce is that the end users are businesses, selling their wares for profit, rather than social activists contributing hours of their time for free for a good cause. To this end, many free open source ecommerce products have floundered as the economics of producing software for free, to businesses that are going to use it to make profit eventually fail.
Some vendors have gone down the route of a free open source base version with a paid-for enterprise one. However due to the fact that so few uses purchase the paid-for one, the costs of it become very high, which in turn restricts sales. Our aim is to have a free base product, and a reasonably priced enterprise one.
The second issue is one of support and architecture. We want to develop a fast, efficient, secure and stable core. By preventing modification of the core by third parties we make upgrades much easier.
If Kartris isn't a not-for-profit project, why is there a free version?
We think we've created a great bit of software. We hope you do too. But you'll never know if you aren't able to try it out on real live websites. We want to have as many people trying Kartris, and giving us feedback. And we appreciate that people don't want to build a site for free, and then find later they have to pay for the software. So we have a completely free version that developers can use to build smaller sites, and learn more about Kartris
Can I give you some feedback about Kartris?
YES PLEASE!!!
Whilst its always nice to get positive feedback, negative feedback is much more useful. We really want to hear what you don't like about Kartris! If you decided not to use it, please let us know why. We can't improve the product or our offering without knowing what you didn't like about it.
Ideally you can give us feedback via the suggestions forum on www.freeaspnetcart.com but if you'd rather not do it in public, then please use our contact form
Where are you guys based? Aren't you in the desert or something?
Cactusoft Ltd is a British company, and Cactusoft International FZ LLC is incorporated in Dubai, UAE (but British owned and managed).
Your demo is in UK Pounds. Can I use it with dollars?
The cart supports multiple currencies, and you can use any currency as the base one. Kartris has a special mode to configure the tax handling to a US model (sales tax) or European model (VAT).