Looking for Feedback on Cartthrob & Using Cartthrob Subscriptions with Realex Payments

Question

Setting out on a new EE / E Commerce project. One requirement is to take registration payments, and we would like to be able to manage these as subscriptions. I see that Cartthrob now provide a subscriptions add on which appears to do everything necessary.

I havent used CT for a few years. The support was great but there were a lot of kinks in the system and it was difficult for a 'less technical' user to troubleshoot, while Brilliant Retail, though limited, was quick and relatively easy to get up and running.

Im looking for people's feedback on the current state of things with CT - has the reporting improved, can you get a general store set up quickly (as with Brilliant Retail)? Its expensive to get the whole suite (Cartthrob & Subscriptions) and Ive seen some reports of slow support.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

K

Answer 1

If you haven't used Cartthrob for a few years then things have moved on quite a bit. There are now several supporting products such as Subscriptions but they don't come cheap. Previous issues with support are now being resolved.

Cartthrob is very flexible but can be considered more of a framework so it does take a little more work to get something up and running as you piece it all together yourself. If you want something simpler then Expresso Store is much simpler to get up and running and integrates seamlessly into ExpressionEngine. It's probably the most user friendly of the bunch. If you're looking to use a subscription model however then it may be a bit trickier with Store. In theory it may be possible to setup some kind of pseudo-subscriptions however but it isn't natively supported as of yet.

Another alternative would be Membrr for subscription billing and recurring payments. If subscriptions are your primary concern then this may be all you need. You may also be able to integrate one of the other ecommerce addons for your other regular product sales if desired.