February 22, 2010
By the ZippyCart Ecommerce Software Content Team
Last week, Pinnacle Cart released an update to their ecommerce software suite that will ensure their customers can obtain success in the evolving online marketplace. This new change, dubbed Pinnacle Cart 3.7.0, takes their ecommerce software to the next level in a number of ways including a move to a table-less CSS layout, the addition of PA DSS / PCI compliance, drag and drop design tools, and so much more. Craig Fox, the founder of Pinnacle Cart, stated that this has been “the longest development process” for an update to their ecommerce package, which was released just in time, as major credit card companies like Visa will soon require all online merchants to work on a PA DSS / PCI compliant platform for their online sales. Ecommerce merchants are quickly becoming aware of this new need, and are switching to PCI compliant software suites like Pinnacle Cart, Miva Merchant, CoreCommerce, and Volusion. Fox noted that this long development process was to ensure this new version of Pinnacle Cart had all of the necessary perks to drive merchant success, and any future updates will move along much faster since the foundation of 3.7.0 has already been laid.
Table-less CSS layouts are a common feature for some shopping cart software products, while others rely on tables as this makes it easier for the software provider to create templates and add updates to their software. While this feature is not unique to all ecommerce companies, it is unique to Pinnacle Cart, who has relied on a table based layout since the beginning. Moving to a table-less CSS layout provides many benefits for Pinnacle Cart customers, with only one very small drawback: customers must upgrade to Pinnacle Cart 3.6 before they can move to 3.7.0, which is a very small task to gain the benefits of the new layout. A CSS based layout means that merchants can perform universal changes to their shopping cart without having to go section by section. This also means that the pages will load faster, which is good for sales, but it is also great for search engines like Google. Search engines reward websites that are up-to-date with their backend code, so moving to this layout will increase the SEO value of any Pinnacle Cart hosted storefront.
In addition to a shift to CSS, Pinnacle Cart has also given merchants more control over their URLs in this update. Merchants can access URLs by page and rename them to ensure that they are keyword rich. Their server also allows merchants to easily 301 redirect non-optimized URLs to any new URLs that they write, which will ensure that they maintain their history in search engines while improving their overall optimization.
Pinnacle Cart 3.7.0 also allows merchants much more freedom over their storefront design. This new version lets users have a unique design or color scheme on a page by page basis, instead of having to keep the same header across the entire site, for example. Experienced designers have full access to the HTML and CSS of their shopping cart, but those who do not know code are able to use the very simple drag and drop style editor, which makes editing your storefront extremely easy. On top of this, Fox explained that they plan to release over 50 new design templates that users can easily add to their storefront.
These are just a few of the great updates that have been added to Pinnacle Cart for their new release of 3.7.0. Additional features include Doba implementation, drop shipping support, customer testimonials, and much more. To see a full list of the new feature set, check it out here. Users who already have Pinnacle Cart can upgrade for free, as well as those who have licensed software and are paying for yearly updates and support. Over the next month, we will take a tour of the new Pinnacle Cart release and provide a full review as well as more details about the new features currently available and soon to come. Check back soon for part 2 of this article when we cover the release of 3.7.1.
Amy is the co-founder of ZippyCart. She went to school for film in Cleveland, Ohio and ended up working in the field of viral video marketing, which eventually led her to her real profession: SEO. When she's not writing for ZippyCart, she can be found out and about Seattle, WA.
