Shopping online has been growing consistently. It’s projected that by 2025, ecommerce makes up 24.5% of real sales worldwide.
If you’re thinking of selling online, know that a poorly designed website can turn away potential customers in the blink of an eye. So, it’s key to choose a website builder that’s both easy to use for you and that’ll capture the attention of your customers.
From desktop to mobile, with Pinnacle Cart you can build a site that gives your customers an engaging buying experience. Pinnacle Cart is an easy to use all-inclusive shopping cart. It gives you the tools you’d expect to build and manage an online store. And then it also offers digital marketing tools.
Back in 2004, Pinnacle Cart was established. It was built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs with the goal to give you everything you need to start promoting and selling your products. It boasts some big name clients such as Discovery Channel. It’s headquartered in Phoenix, United States.
- Pros and cons of Pinnacle Cart
- Who is Pinnacle Cart for?
- How easy is Pinnacle Cart to use?
- Pinnacle Cart design and themes
- How to manage your ecommerce store in Pinnacle Cart?
- Pinnacle Cart integrations
- What marketing and SEO tools does Pinnacle Cart have?
- Payment options
- Pinnacle Cart security
- Pinnacle Cart customer support
- Pinnacle Cart pricing
- Is Pinnacle Cart the right tool for you?
Pros and cons of Pinnacle Cart
Pinnacle Cart is hosted solution. This means everything is set up and ready for you and you don’t need to get into the technical stuff like hosting or maintenance and security. Although you can also get a self-hosted solution.
It gives you all the tools to build your website, manage products and orders, handle your marketing campaigns, and collect data so that you see how your store is performing.
Pros
- Easy to use
- 14 days free trial doesn’t ask for your credit card details
- It supports physical, digital, and virtual products
- 24/7 live chat support
- Integration with accounting services such as Quickbooks
- Robust SEO tools
- Scalable
Cons
- No blogging tool
- You trade in ease of use with how much you can customise
- The extensive feature set means it’s also more costly than BigCommerce or Shopify
Who is Pinnacle Cart for?
Pinnacle Cart is a good pick for merchants who are just starting as well as for large sellers with experience. If you’re just starting, it can grow with your business. It comes with many features so that it can satisfy the needs of many merchants across different industries.
How easy is Pinnacle Cart to use?
It’s always nice if a service doesn’t ask for your credit card details when you create an account but it wants your phone number. On the one hand, not giving your credit card details means you can test the service without pressure. On the other hand, handing in the phone number always makes me think that it can be sold or misused – remember the robocalls?
The signup and setup process takes a few minutes. You’re taken through a 4 step setup wizard, in which you have to answer questions about your store’s address, shipping options, and taxes. After the setup wizard, you’re taken to the dashboard. It’s where you do all the work and see at a glance what’s happening in your store.
At signup, Pinnacle Cart creates all the necessary pages for your online store. This means you only need to add your products and any custom pages. All the features are neatly arranged and clearly labelled. Without breaking a sweat, you can do all your work with its intuitive user interface.
Pinnacle Cart design and themes
When your account is created, your website comes with the default theme Decollete. You can change the theme by clicking on the tab Front-End in the left side menu, then Manage themes.
There are in total 17 free themes to choose from. They’re built to work with almost any type of online store. You can customise each theme, edit the overall page layout, change colours, and typography.
How to manage your ecommerce store in Pinnacle Cart?
You won’t find pre-loaded sample products that you can modify, but it’s very easy to add a new product. You can sell physical, digital, and virtual products in Pinnacle. If it’s a digital product, Pinnacle Cart will host it for you.
Stores with a large inventory will find the import function practical. It lets you upload a CSV file of your entire product database.
You’ll find everything you need in the tab Order & Customers to manage customers, send notifications, update order status, fulfill orders, supply tracking information, print shipping labels, and view payments. All in all managing products and orders is well-thought-out.
Pinnacle Cart integrations
Pinnacle Cart has a rich and extensive feature set out of the box, so most probably you don’t need so many addons. Still, Pinnacle Cart has an App Center where the plugins are grouped into
- Accounting
- Customer engagement
- Hosting
- Marketing
- Reports & analytics
- Shipping
If you don’t find a third party integration and have coding skills, you can make you of Pinnacle Cart’s API and create a custom connection. You can also add code snippets to your site. These are custom Javascript and CSS code. This way you can embed any service that provides embeddable code.
What marketing and SEO tools does Pinnacle Cart have?
This is where Pinnacle Cart stands out. You get to integrate with popular social networks for social sharing. You can also
- Invite visitors to sign up for your newsletters
- Set promotional or global discounts
- Recover abandoned carts
- Testimonials
- Gift cards
- And more
SEO
PinnacleCart has better tools for SEO than its competitors such as Shopify. You can create your own URL structure. You can also define the meta title and description for every individual page, including each category and product page.
Blogging
For a service that offers so many options and tools to help with your marketing, it’s a curious shortcoming that Pinnacle Cart doesn’t include a blogging tool.
Payment options
Pinnacle Cart has more than 25 different payment gateways for you to choose from including the known providers such as Paypal and Stripe on the higher plans. You can only choose Paypal or Prupay.com in the entry level plan Standard.
It’s worth noting that Pinnacle Cart doesn’t charge transaction fees, although you need to factor in what the payment gateways charge.
Pinnacle Cart security
Pinnacle Cart boasts that it’s the only shopping cart that is both PCI and PA-DSS compliant. It allows you to sign up to FraudLabs and No Fraud for fraud detection.
All sites built with it come with SSL certificates to protect customer data. Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated: If you use its shared SSL option, you don’t get your custom domain for your site.
In other words, your store’s URL is something like “yourstore.mypinnaclecart.com”. If you want to have SSL on your custom domain, you need to subscribe to the Advanced plan or pay $149 per year.
You’ll be happy to know that Pinnacle Cart lets you make backups of your site. However, backups add to your overall disk space. This is important if you’re subscribed to the entry level plan Standard.
Pinnacle Cart customer support
All plans get access to live chat and can submit a ticket to its helpdesk 24/7. The higher plans also include phone support.
It’s interesting that Pinnacle Cart is so confident in the quality of its customer support, that it also offers to be the customer service of your store. In other words, you can outsource your customer service to Pinnacle Cart’s support team.
Pinnacle Cart pricing
Pinnacle Cart bases its pricing on the sales you’re making as well as the features you can get. Of course the higher the plan, the more features you get.
Unfortunately, on its entry plan Standard, it limits disk space and bandwidth to 10GB and 20GB respectively.
Is Pinnacle Cart the right tool for you?
Pinnacle Cart comes with an extensive feature set that includes many important marketing tools. It’s great for SEO, limitless inventory, easy setup, and use. It’s great both for novices and merchants that want to scale to enterprise-level, if you can live without blogging.
Original post here: Pinnacle Cart review
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