Pinnacle Cart
Price: $30/month
Very clean and simple to use and packed with marketing tools to ensure you never loose a sales Pinnacle Cart will immediately boost your bottom line and speed up your day to day administrative tasks.
00000I like Pinnacle Cart a lot. It was obviously made by some very smart people. It comes in hosted and licensed versions so you will never outgrow it. It has tonnes of built in functionality and looks so clean and straight forward, definitely the easiest shopping cart to look at.
The biggest plus to Pinnacle Cart is the marketing tools built right into the software and ready to use from day one.
Drift Marketing: Automatically email abandoned cart users and offer them an incentive to come back and complete the checkout process. Never loose a sale again.
Global Price Sales: Set an across the board price discount ($ or % amount) to decrease prices for a one day fire sale for instance.
Email Newsletter System:
Product Update Email Wizard: Send emails to clients when you add new products. Instant return customers. Instant sales boost.
The short version. If you are in North America and care more about traffic and sales than design, give Pinnacle Cart a spin.
Features of Pinnacle Cart
- B2B support and wholesale customer support
- Wish lists and Gift Certificates
- QR Code Generator. Very cool feature, I hope more people take this option up
- Facebook and Mobile store
- Excellent SEO including access to robots.txt and htaccess files (very cool)
- Easy to use and powerful discount and promotional tools
- Product syndication like Shopzilla and Google Product Search, Price Grabber and Next Tag
- Product reviews
- Lots of free themes (Free Pinnacle Cart Themes Gallery)
Advantages of using Pinnacle Cart
- Drift marketing support built right in. Never loose sales to abandoned carts again. This is so good it makes my skin tingle.
- The best backup and restore system of any shopping cart. Super simple to use you two things backup tools need to be. Still the only hosted shopping cart that allows you to do complete backups, not just selective exports of what they want you to have.
- Hides options you disable like wholesale, digital products, wish lists or QR codes. this is minor but it cleans up the interface to remove the options you have disabled.
- Rather inflexible, if you want something outside the traditional online store you might be better with CoreCommerce or BigCommerce
- For Quickbooks integration you will need a third party product like Webgility eCommerce Connector
- Product Update Email Wizard. This is super cool. It allows you to quickly create an email (and send it to all your customers) with images and details of your latest products and links to buy them. So simple but the effect on your sales is monumental.
Problems with Pinnacle Cart
- The template system is a bit painful and it is tricky to edit the head and foot of the document. Not the worst template system around, and once you have it setup it isn’t a problem but expect to pay a couple of hundred dollars more for a Pinnacle Cart template than say a BigCommerce template.
- Difficult to make work if you are based outside the USA and Canada. Not a problem if you are North American though.
Payment Gateways Supported by Pinnacle Cart
Australians please note that there is no support for eWay. I only point this out because Australian’s have a tendency to just assume everything supports eWay – but that’s just because everything should support eWay.
- 2Checkout.com
- Amazon Simple Pay
- Authorize.Net AIM 3.0
- Authorize.Net AIM 3.1
- Authorize.Net CP 1.0
- Authorize.Net eCheck.Net
- Chase Paymentech Orbital
- Credit Card Storage
- DataCash
- DirectOne
- EC Suite
- Echo-Inc.com
- FastTransact.com
- First Data / LinkPoint.comGoogle CheckoutHSBC-CPI
- Intuit Payment Services
- iTransact.com
- Moneris.com
- Moneybookers Quick Checkout
- NetBilling.com
- NTPNow.Com
- Payjunction
- PayLeap
- PayPal Express Checkout
- PayPal PayFlow Link
- PayPal Payflow Pro
- PayPal Website Payments Pro
- PayPal Website Payments Pro (Payflow Edition)
- PayPal Website Payments Standard
- Protx.com
- PsiGate.com
- Secure Hosting
- Secure Trading Payment Pages
- SecurePay (Australia) SecureXML
- Shift4.com
- Transaction Central
- USAepay
- ViaKLIX
- Virtual Merchant
- WorldPay.com
- Custom Payment Method
Shipping Providers Supported by Pinnacle Cart
- Canada Post
- FedEx
- UPS
- USPS
That’s it. There are custom methods and fixed shipping if they are applicable but out of the box if you are not north american you will struggle. Don’t take it personally. Try BigCommerce.
Clueless and arrogant support staff (after being on hold forever). Cart crashing on a weekly basis. Promise of unlimited items, yet they want more $$$ for a number far less than “unlimited”. March 15th, 2012.
Pinnacle cart doesn’t promise unlimited products Mike, so I’m not sure what your talking about. I really like Pinnacle Cart. It’s very easy to use and they work with all the PayPal methods. It’s been around a long time and many people use it. Try it out.
Um,
Yes they do, always have to my knowledge.
the reason for the crappy support is the fact that this ancient, buggy software has never been updated and they just keep releasing patches to keep up with the newest trends. Garbage is too kind a word
As a website developer, I have worked with many different cart systems. Pinnacle Cart is not only an amazing and very easy to use and customize, but their customer support is like nothing I have ever seen. In this day and age when support can often run you through hoops or cause major delays, they are responsive, thorough and extremely helpful
Pinnacle cart is way easy to use and customize. It has great list of features those are essential to have any successful business. I would ask to use them for any success biz seeker!!!
I will agree with Mike about the clueless and arrogant support.
In our experiences:
They will tell you one thing and when it hoses your site they will charge you to fix it.
They wont help with simple matters that I believe fall under their responsibility, but would rather try to charge me extra for it.
They say things like “Would be much easier than trying to do the method that is impossible to do.” What?!
Their hosting is slow and laggy.
Even though we paid $2K for them to develop our custom skin, we’re looking to dump them and move on to better things.
Thanks for review.
As for me Pinnacle is the best hosted solution if you live in North America.
By the way you can also read this post, it was quite interesting for me: http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com/useful-articles/62-pinnacle-useful-articles/5391-build-the-perfect-store-with-pinnacle
Their new quickbooks integration is exactly what i needed to automate my business. If you’re looking for a Quickbooks shopping cart this is it. Their site/staff tell me they are the only company integrated with the auto-synch and based upon the QB website, their right.
Absolute worst site/cart designer I have ever worked with. Customer service is terrible, you can never and I mean NEVER get someone on the phone to help you. The templates are just terrible. If you like programming I’m sure you will enjoy the challenges of making the Pinnacle Cart work, for the rest of us that would rather spend time on our business than our website I recommend using another cart.
cancelled account some months ago via email as requested still carried on charging me.Spoke to online help they said I would receive confirmation email none received.Spoke to them today they sa no record of cancellation ,I have said how come none of my user names or passwords work since cancellation awaiting reply