Heidi Nel, President of Heidi’s Heavenly Cookies was kind enough to send us this video talking about her experiences with Pinnacle Cart. We always love to hear from our customers and we very much appreciate Heidi sending us this video. If you have any comments about Pinnacle Cart, please send us an email at info@pinnaclecart.com.
Quick tip for improving cart abandonment rates
Recent industry reports put shopping cart abandonment rates at anywhere from 20 to 50%. In too many cases, cart checkout processes take too long, require too many clicks and involve too many requests for non-essential information. Shoppers get distracted, impatient and distressed. They lose interest, leave the site, or simply take a detour to shop and research at another online store. The result is a huge lost revenue opportunity. Here are a couple of interesting statistics regarding the checkout process:
- According to Forrester Research, the average shopping cart abandonment rate among online retailers is 36 percent.
- 38 percent of online users do not buy online because they have to register with a site before purchasing. (source: Forrester)
One way to decrease cart abandonment is to not require the customer to create an account or to give them the option of creating an account. This can be done very easily in Pinnacle Cart by completing the following steps:
First login to the control panel of your cart and go to Cart Setting >> Global Cart Settings and select Order / Cart Settings.
Scroll down to “Allow Create Account” and select “Allow user to decide” or “No” and click save at the bottom of the page.
We suggest only forcing customer to create an account only if it is absolutely necessary for your business. You’ll be doing yourself and your customers a favor by giving them the power to create an account.
Happy Selling!
Pinnacle Cart 3.7 has been certified “most search-engine-friendly cart” by International SEO firm CyberMark International
We have worked extensively with one of the world most respected search engine optimization firms, Cybermark International, to ensure Pinnacle Cart is properly designed for the most optimized ranking on all popular search sites including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN, AOL, Mamma.com and more. With features like; SEO friendly URL’s, custom URL’s ( for sites that are already indexed) SEO friendly hyperlinks, compliant header tags, complete meta tag control, product-based keywords, strict CSS / XHTML / tableless coding, WC3 compliant pages , robots.txt file and more! Pinnacle Cart will generate free, organic traffic for your website.
CyberMark International CEO Kimberly Judd-Pennie had this to say about the SEO friendly features in Pinnacle Cart:
“We have worked with many different ecommerce applications over the past 15 years and the features found in Pinnacle Cart are light years ahead of anything found on the market today. Almost every ecommerce application on the market says they are search engine optimized, but most are far from it. The Pinnacle Cart platform has been fundamentally designed to help merchants get indexed properly and get the best possible rankings. This leads to greater exposure, more traffic and ultimately, increased sales.”
“We went to the experts in the field of SEO Marketing to learn how to better serve our customer base.” says Mike Auger, President of Pinnacle Cart “The results are off the charts and our customers are already seeing the sales results by using the new features. We look forward to long-term relationship with Cybermark.”
Changes in requirements for processing MasterCard and Discover
MasterCard and Discover are requiring that all merchants support the following:
Balance response transactions — For prepaid and gift cards, once the card has been used, the remaining account balance will be transmitted along with the authorization response. The remaining balance must be printed on the customer receipt, displayed on the Web page or point-of-sale terminal, or both.
Partial authorization transactions — When a customer’s transaction amount exceeds the balance available on their debit, prepaid or gift card, instead of declining the transaction, a partial authorization for the amount available to the customer will be returned. This will allow the customer to pay for the remaining amount with another form of payment. This is called a split-tender transaction.
Authorization reversals — An authorization reversal is a real-time transaction initiated when the customer decides that they do not want to proceed with the transaction, or if the merchant cannot complete the transaction for any reason. Authorization reversals free up the customer’s available balance on their debit, prepaid or gift card.
MasterCard’s rule changes go into effect May 1, 2010, and Discover’s rule changes go into effect April 16, 2010. However, many payment gateways have worked with their supported payment processors to extend these deadlines. One of the more popular payment gateways, Authorize.net has outlined their anticipated support for these regulations by payment processor. For more information direct your browser to: http://www.authorize.net/support/pafaqs/#when
We are very much aware of these changes and taking steps to make insure that our system will support these requirements. Since many of the requirements require changes at the transaction level, we are working with our supported payment gateways to better understand the changes they expect to make in their systems so we can adjust accordingly.
Design Feature – Changing Price Color
We had a question in our discussion board about changing the color of price and thought this might be a great place to answer the question and help everyone understand some of the new tools in Pinnacle Cart 3.7:
1) Activate “Design Mode” in the management area of the cart, roll over price and right click to bring up the “Edit Styles” window.
2) In the editor make sure Product Price is highlighted and move your mouse to the color field.
3) Click to bring up the color selector ( you can also type in an HTML color) and select the new color.
4) Check the preview window and the bottom to see the expect result and click “Save”. The page will refresh automatically and the new color will appear.
As you can see, changing colors on any element in your site is very easy and you can make changes by specific pages, giving you greater control over your site.