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
What to consider when researching a shopping cart provider.
Doing your homework is the most important step in selecting a shopping cart provider. With so many options available, selecting the best shopping cart can be a daunting and time consuming process. It’s important to understand not all eCommerce systems are created equally. Therefore, it’s important to evaluate your options and make sure you select the right software for your business.
Here’s our list of the top 3 things to look for in a shopping cart provider:
1) Is it secure?
This is the most simple, but often overlooked, selection criteria. To avoid fines, fees and possible legal action, make sure the software you are using is both PA DSS and PCI certified and compliant. If the eCommerce company you’re looking at isn’t bragging about their certifications, odds are it’s not compliant. Compliant solutions don’t cost any more than non-compliant solutions so if you don’t see “PA-DSS / PCI Compliant” it’s best to move on.
2) Is it scalable?
When searching for an ecommerce provider, many merchants think too short term. Sure a “hosted only” solution will be able to get you started, but once the sales start rolling in do you have the ability to scale without being charged astronomical fees? Having your provider host your store does have its advantages. For example, maintenance and support is typically easier in the hosted model, but stores with high transaction volumes need dedicated and distributed solutions to ensure high accessibility. Once your store is clicking, odds are you’ll rarely need to contact your provider for issues outside of hosting. Some providers prey on successful stores knowing they have no choice but to pay them whatever “hosting” fees they ask. They also understand moving to another solution can be time consuming and difficult so they tend to charge higher rates to stores making more sales. Make sure when the sales start rolling in, you can move your store and scale to the needs of YOUR business, not the needs of theirs.
3) Do they offer support?
Most ecommerce providers offer little to no support. Even worse, some providers offer only “pay-per-incident” support. Think about this for a second…why would you trust your business to a company that has a financial incentive to provide you an inferior product? Under the “pay-per-incident” model, the more tickets and support calls they get, the more money they make. Bottom line, stay away from any company that doesn’t give you access to free support resources.
While this list is short, it’s important to keep these very important things in mind when selecting the best online shopping cart for your business.
Free Webinars – Cart Training, Advanced Cart Design, Search Engine Optimization and More!
Attend one of our webinar sessions to get the most out of your Pinnacle Cart eCommerce Solution. Our knowledge and friendly trainers will walk through important shopping cart features and help you better understand how they can be used to effectively promote your business and generate more sales.
Click here to view our webinar schedule.
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.
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.