Pinnacle Cart Review
Pinnacle Cart is one of the leading e-commerce platforms available today. Founded by Internet professionals who were evidently unsatisfied with existing online shopping carts, Pinnacle Cart has evolved over the years into an elegant system which provides solutions to questions before they’re asked, as well as the tools to bring wishes to fruition (in the e-commerce world, of course).
This shopping cart system was made with results in mind. Making e-commerce work is their motto and that isn’t simply some cheesy one-liner, it is truly the foundation on which this solution has been built measuring its success not from ease of use, or the number of features available, or the increase in quarterly revenues but rather from the results their clients are obtaining making Pinnacle Cart much more of a pleasant experience instead of a tedious chore.
Highlights
The first and most obvious advantage to using Pinnacle Cart is the fact that it lives up to its promise of being easy to use. While this was true in previous versions, this fact has become even more emphasized with the release of version 3.7.5. By easy to use we mean for everyone, programmers, optimizers and rookies alike. From the moment you sign up for your account you are given guidance presented in such an intuitive manner than you’re more than likely to complete half your storefront setup before you even take a break. Other shopping carts with similarly powerful backends are often and notoriously convoluted, if not downright intimidating. Pinnacle Cart sets a tone for their user’s experience that is consistent from their web design to the publishing of your online storefront. Every step leads to the next with an elegance that is refreshing and most certainly welcome.
Concerning the SEO value of this system, you need not worry about your product or category links filled with query strings. The ability to customize your page URLs is standard allowing you to set up your website the way you want it. Also included is the ability to add your meta titles and descriptions to every page. You can even auto generate your product meta descriptions from the product descriptions which is such a time-saver. Better still, you are offered the ability to set up naming schemes for products and category links, as well as generating alt tags from image names. This is a highly efficient way to provide all your imported products with search engine friendly links.
What is particularly useful is the ability to change your URLs to match your old online store’s links. You can tell you’re dealing with a company who is serious about search engine optimization when you can preserve your ranking when switching to a better platform. It is evidence that Pinnacle Cart cares more about the success of your venture than bringing down their competition. Add to that the capability of editing your robots.txt file and adding ALT attributes to images and you have a company who focuses both on the bigger picture and the finer details of online visibility.
To attest to their broader view, the latest version of the Pinnacle Cart e-commerce solution extends the idea of optimization to more than just search engines. Newcomers can avoid fiddling with server files by adding their Google Analytics and Conversion codes right in the backend. Integration with the ever-popular MailChimp allows you to continue your interactions with your existing clients fostering loyalty and encouraging repeat customers. Yet it is the Drift Marketing, which allows you to contact users who have left your site without purchasing their items, that is decidedly attractive. Having visitors find your website, be able to easily shop and buy, and enticing visitors to return to your site in the future covers nearly every base there is.
Something we hadn’t anticipated seeing in major shopping carts until well into next year is the option to have social media network integration. Pinnacle Cart allows you to add not only Facebook and Twitter counters to your web storefront, but also plays well with other social media platforms such as Digg and Google Buzz providing users with an avenue to promote your wares by broadcasting them to wide and ever-expanding networks. Social commerce being a concept which is really taking hold with Internet strategists these days, it is excellent to see an e-commerce solution moving steadily in that direction and keeping pace.
Pinnacle Cart is a hosted solution but also allows those who prefer to run the software on their own server to do so, even going so far as to provide access to the source code. This range of access allows Pinnacle Cart to cater to everyone’s need from smaller online storefronts all the way up to powerful and dynamic corporate e-commerce portals. As you grow Pinnacle Cart will be able to be by your side every step of the way eliminating the growing pains of a successful web venture.
Limitations
There are no limitations for this cart worth mentioning. It is an all-around product which has covered the bases on essentially everything you are likely to need. Moreover, Pinnacle Cart actively and continuously improves their product making it a solution that will be there along the way as your needs and intentions evolve.
We would like to see more multi-lingual options, such as the ability to easily create SEO-friendly versions of a e-commerce website without sacrificing online visibility. It is a chore to develop, we know, but if there was ever a shopping cart up to the challenge it would be Pinnacle Cart.
Overall
Let’s be perfectly frank: you can’t go wrong with this solution. It’s usable, it’s filled to the brim with features, and it’s so beautiful compared to other e-commerce platforms that you’ll wonder how you ever dealt with some of their competitors. If you are committed to the success of your online store and you don’t at the very least test drive the trial version then you are most definitely missing out. Especially since there is no real excuse as it takes only a few minutes to understand that Pinnacle Cart is a player worth watching.
We are actually eager to see what they will release in the future. This system has been growing and evolving remarkably well over the last few years and it’s only getting better with age. To get a feel of what we’re referring to take some time to read their blog (http://blog.pinnaclecart.com/). This was the first aspect aside from the shopping cart itself that blew us away. It is jam packed with information that will make your experience with Pinnacle Cart feel productive. If you think we’ve over sold them then you probably haven’t fully done your due diligence because we don’t have to sell this product – it sells itself.
Visit PinnacleCart.com to start your free trial today.
We own 4 pinnacle shopping carts and we have so many problems with the software and the pinnacle’s support. Issues with security, customers started seeing other customers accounts, pinnacle support response: we have to log in to our ftp and regularly empty sessiondata folder or this will happen again, what a joke. If and when there system is down (and it happens often) you can’t log in to your admin panel to process orders, last time there system crashed they lost two of our registrations and now we can only use two of the shopping carts, we don’t care because we are switching to CS-Cart much better and more secure shopping cart. Support is not free, email support is over $200 yearly. Installation instruction is missing information and it is very difficult to understand and you will not be able to upgrade with there help so you do have to pay for the support, 3 upgrades we experienced the same result errors and the site is down for days until the support gets to your support ticket. we give up we have spend so much time and money customizing poinnaclecart you will need an expired it is not user friendly at all. Don’t waste your time and money like we did with pinnaclecart.
Pinnacle looked very interesting until I discovered that it has essentially no Builtin Quickbooks integration. I do not consider a csv file ‘integration’. Nor is having to go to a third party for software. Too bad… I thought Pinnacle might be my solution. Oh .. Don’t bother with big commerce. Their implementation of web connector is ridiculous.