Pinnacle Cart is one of the few eCommerce solutions that offers a great collection of features, great performance, a very user-friendly interface, and cutting-edge technologies like Ajax, all at a reasonable price.
Marketing-Centric eCommerce
Pinnacle Cart is a PHP-based shopping cart application that was developed with marketing in mind, which sets it apart from many competing eCommerce applications. It's very search-engine friendly, offering features such as URL-friendly links, meta tags, image tags, and data feed generation (ie. RSS, Googlebase, Shopzilla) to help drive traffic to your site. You can manage URL's at both the category and product levels, and Pinnacle is very Google-friendly, making Google Analytics integration, conversion tracking, and Google Sitemap creation pretty much migraine-free.
Pinnacle Cart also includes its own Email Management module, allowing you to create and send newsletters, as well as product updates, to your customer lists. It also allows you to import and export your customer email addresses.
Of course, Pinnacle Cart offers many other marketing and merchandising features, such as Recommended Products, Product Reviews, Recently Viewed Items, Product Promotions, Discount Codes, and Gift Certificates. As you can see, Pinnacle offers you enough marketing and merchandising tools for you not to succeed with your online business.
Design (in)Flexibility?
As web designers focusing on eCommerce, we know that it's one thing to find an eCommerce system, or shopping cart, that offers a huge number of features, and another to find one that also offers design flexibility. What's the point of having all those features if you don't have the ability to make your eCommerce shopping cart look completely different than everyone else's? Nowadays, you really need to stand apart from the rest, and the "look & feel" of your website is ground zero for standing apart. So, we're very sensitive to the need for complete customization of an eCommerce shopping cart, without having to venture into programmers' territory.
Although Pinnacle Cart claims to offer "complete customization", we can't quite fully agree. One way of determining how well an application handles customization is in it's handling of the "storefront" or home page. Because the home page is the first page visitors arrive to, it's vital to have the ability for complete design freedom, making the home page unique, attractive, intriguing and enticing. With Pinnacle, however, you must pay an additional fee to receive their source code, which will give you access to the code for the home page. On top of that, knowledge of the PHP programming language is required, which isn't very designer-friendly.
To be fair, however, we were very excited to find out that Pinnacle's latest major upgrade (v3.7) now offers CSS / XHTML tableless design, which puts Pinnacle Cart way ahead of the pack. Because this new version was just recently released, we haven't had a chance yet to play with it and see if it handles the home page any differently. We sure hope so, and will update this article once we know for sure.
An eCommerce Home Run
Pinnacle Cart has always been a solid contender in the crowded eCommerce shopping cart segment, and with its recently released version 3.7 it hit a home run with a bevy of new and powerful features. Some of the new features available include: CSS / XHTML tableless design, image tags (for SEO!), customize URL structure (for SEO!), product reviews, support for UPC & SKU numbers, complete drop shipping management (huge!), RSS product feeds, layered navigation (huge!), new items page, knowledgebase ... and these are just the new features!
Prior to this release, Pinnacle Cart was positioned middle-of-the-road at $595 per license. The new version, however, has raised the price to $797 per license, which, we believe, is still a very good buy considering everything you get.
Pinnacle also recently jumped on board the "hosted solution" bandwagon and now offers a hosted option as an alternative to buying the license outright. As you know, we're not very keen on hosted solutions (read why here), so we think you should stick to purchasing the license, if Pinnacle Cart is the right choice for you.
