Win $2,000 in Free Web Design Services!
Did you know that Pinnacle Cart offers in-house website design services? To showcase our skills, we are offering anyone a chance to win a brand new website design package, courtesy of our World Class Design team. Fill out this quick entry form to enter our design package contest. One lucky winner will be drawn at random on or about 6/1/2013. The winner will receive a Platinum design package valued at $2000. Complete the entry by clicking here or on the image below for a chance to win!
Pinnacle Cart Web 2K Contest Rules Platinum Web Design Package Details
eCommerce Security — Are you Safe Shopping Online?
Small business owners are 100 percent responsible for their customers’ personal information and credit card data. One of the biggest myths is that security is tied solely to credit card information. The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Council will be the first to point out that it is as much about the personal information of your customers as it is about their credit cards. At the end of the day, banks can be a safety net if someone were to get your customers’ credit card information. Unfortunately, there isn’t a safety net if personal information is stolen from an online business.
PCI compliance is still a misunderstood concept. While there is plenty of material available on the topic, a small group of people have most of the information. History shows us that when this type of situation occurs in the marketplace, a lot of people end up buying services that don’t help at all. If your credit card company, ecommerce provider, hosting company, bank or other provider offers you a new service to assist in maintaining PCI compliance, simply ask the following question. “By purchasing this service, are you guaranteeing that you will pay for any fines or loss of business I might suffer if my online store becomes compromised?”
More often than not, the answer will be no. So why would you pay money for something that won’t help you with the problem? The answer is lack of knowledge. Most small business owners don’t have enough time to run their stores, much less to keep up with the security requirements for maintaining an online business. As a result, when a service provider approaches an online businessperson about a new service to secure it customers, it scares many business owners into purchasing it.
The first step
The bottom line is this: online retailers must find the time and take responsibility for protecting their customers. For ecommerce, be sure you are using a PA DSS (Payment Application Data Security Standard) certified application or a business that is PCI DSS certified. That is the first step. After picking the right ecommerce provider, you must take control of the rest of your customers’ security. This can be achieved by going through the PCI DSS process to get your business certified.
Pinnacle Cart, for example, carries the PA DSS certification and works with hosting companies that are PCI DSS compliant. Still, it does not have control over its own destiny. If the company it uses decided to stop offering PCI DSS hosting, Pinnacle Cart would be forced to spend a lot of money moving customers to another data center. To gain control of its security, the company is working on becoming PCI DSS compliant. The process isn’t easy and it costs money, but the return on investment will come to any business that commits to the process. You can show your compliance on your website like a badge of honor, and you will likely see an increase in website conversions.
Mike Auger is president and CEO of Pinnacle Cart, a hosted shopping cart and ecommerce software application that allows you to create, manage and effectively market your business. www.pinnaclecart.com.
View article published in Independent Retailer: http://bit.ly/ecommercesecurity
Pinnacle Cart 3.7.8 r.800 Hits the Streets
Our latest version, 3.7.8 r.800 is out and ready for action. While this release is primarily focused on bug fixes and updates to various systems within the application, we have added a few new features including the PayLeap payment gateway. To update your cart, login to the control panel of your cart and click the update link found directly under your sales graph data.
As always, we STRONGLY recommend you create a back-up of your cart before applying any updates. Also, please use caution when attempting to update a live store as updates have the potential to affect some customizations. If you have ANY questions, please give a call to our knowledgeable and friendly technical support team at 800-506-0398.
For detailed information about this release, direct your browser to http://www.cartmanual.com/update-378-R800.shtml
Thank you for being a valued Pinnacle Cart customer!
Pinnacle Cart 3.7.5 is out!
Yes, we finally got the latest rendition of Pinnacle Cart out the door. We are uber excited about the new features included in this version. Click here to see all the new goodness. We will be adding a couple of tweeks throughout the next few weeks to assist with some of the new Product Syndication features we’ve added. You’ll be able to bring these updates in through the control panel of your cart or contact our support team and they can help.
Pinnacle Cart 3.7.5 Preview – Quick Start Guide
We are just wrapping up packaging our latest release v3.7.5 and plan on putting new clients on to the platform later this week. We will be able to update existing clients starting next week.
As many of your know we’ve spent the last couple of months diligently working on this release and we are very excited to get it into the hands of our customers. One of the great new features you can expect is our Quick Start Guide. This guide is designed to help new and existing customers get their store up and running quickly in 8 very easy steps. Additionally we’ve added the option of loading in testing products and categories to assist you in designing your store without having to add your own products.
Below are a couple of screen shots from the new Quick Start Guide.
Pinnacle Cart 3.7.5 Preview – Drift Marketing
Come Sail Away, Come Sail Away, Come Sail Away with Me..
Great song, terrible thing to have happen to customers. Pinnacle Cart has developed a marketing tool to recapture customers get caught up in some other moment and abandon their shopping cart before completing their intended purchase.
In our newest version, 3.7.5 (coming soon!) we have developed a marketing tool to recapture those customers that do not complete the purchase process.
Enter Drift Marketing (cue the reggae tunes – sail away, drift, get
it?) Drift Marketing is a new term, but an easy concept. Essentially, it’s taking an action to bring a customer back to your storefront to complete their order.
Let’s consider our imaginary store, MyWorldFamousSpiceCollection.net. Tony Customer is shopping in your store. Tony adds a couple of your world famous spice blends to his cart. After also adding one of your hand embroidered “Kiss The Chef” aprons, Tony navigates to the checkout page. As Tony reaches for his wallet to get his credit card information, he realizes the ribs he’s got on the grill outside are in grave danger. He dashes out the door to save the ribs and his transaction (and your sale!) is long forgotten.
Or is it?
As a store owner, nothing is more frustrating than seeing orders and dollars sitting in an “abandoned” status. All of your marketing time and money flushed down the drain over something outside of your control.
Our Drift Marketing tool allows you to create campaigns to email your customers at designated time intervals after the cart is abandoned – due to burning ribs or otherwise.
Maybe you want to send an email with the entire content of their cart as a reminder they still need to complete the order. Perhaps you want to follow up 6 hours later with a discount code for 5%, 10% or 15% off their entire order. These marketing initiatives can all be accomplished through our new Drift Marketing system.
Just another innovative way we are helping our customers increase their sales using Pinnacle Cart.
Example WordPress and Pinnacle Cart Integration
We found this video on Word Press Slides and Videos (http://wpslide.com/) and wanted to share it with you. The author gives a quick demonstration of what their WordPress integration with Pinnacle Cart looks like. We love this sort of thing! If you have any integration you’d care to share with our users, please let us know and we’ll post it up on our blog.
Pinnacle Cart 3.7.5 Preview – Sell your products on Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Google and more
Throughout the next week I’d like to give you a preview of some of the amazing features you can expect in the latest version of Pinnacle Cart. One of the most anticipated features in the new cart is our Product Syndication system. Using our proprietary system, you can easily push all, or just selected products to the world’s most trafficked websites including Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Google Product Search, Yahoo, Shopzilla, Pricegrabber and more. Just another set of features allowing you to reach more customers and sell more products. Amazing isn’t it? What we’ve listed here is just the start as our new system will allow for exports for all aspects of your business.
Pinnacle Cart version 3.7.4 released
We’ve just released the latest version of Pinnacle Cart, version 3.7.4. In this version we’ve brought back many of the easy-to-use design tools from previous versions and combined them with the visual CSS editor in 3.7. Additionally you’ll notice we’ve made some changes to DOBA to improve the functionality and speed up the process of loading items into your cart. We’ve also made improvements to our API and released the documentation that coincides with it. And if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also fixed some bugs in the WYSIWYG editor, inventory and other issues you’ve called to our attention. So go ahead and upgrade to the latest version of Pinnacle Cart, we think you’ll be happy with the results. Most clients will see the upgrade in the control panel of the cart; simply follow the instructions to complete the upgrade. If you don’t see the upgrade in your cart, log to our management area at account.pinnaclecart.com and download the latest version.
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.”