eCommerce

We are pleased to announce new features coming February the 18th for our shopping cart. Below are a list of those features.

Product Reviews - This powerful new tool allows customers or even potential customers to comment on / and rate your products. Product reviews come in handy when potential customers are browsing your site; it allows them to evaluate the quality and value of products. As an administrator you’ll have the ability to manually moderate, edit, and manage reviews, and even change your rating graphic.

CSS / XHTML Template Design – All customer facing pages in the new version of the application will be CSS / XHTML driven. This is a major leap forward compared to the tabled version of the application. Besides being more search engine friendly, you’ll be able to very easily customize and change the look and feel of your site quickly. This will give us and our third party developers the ability to rapidly create custom design templates.

Drag and Drop Design Tools – With the new template designs comes our new Drag and Drop design tools. Once in “Design Mode” you’ll be able to change the placement of anything on the front end of your cart by dragging it to the desired location. Additionally you will be able to edit any HTML or CSS code directly from the front end of the site. This is all done using a brand new graphical user interface that we have created.

Template Upload Feature – Soon we’ll be introducing all kinds of new template designs for you to download from the Pinnacle Cart site. And the great news is adding them to your cart is a breeze, you can simply select the template you want from the administrative area of the application and it download it into the cart. You can also switch between templates with a click of a button.

Product Level Promo Codes – Not only can you create promo codes at the global level, but now you can designate which products the promo codes are valid for.

Doba Implementation - Doba provides a place where suppliers can list their product inventory, and you sell these items directly from your site. With over 1.2 million products at your fingertips, you’ll be able to vastly improve the inventory in your cart without the headache of managing inventory and the whole process is complexly automated. These different suppliers will drop ship products right to your customers, so you never have to handle or ship products.

Drop Shipping Feature – The new version will allow you to assign warehouses or drop ship locations to individual products. Therefore allows different rates to be charged by product depending on shipping location.

Improved SEO Tools – We’ve improved our flat URL generation feature to give you more control over the URL’s created by Pinnacle Cart. Want to create a unique URL for a specific product, no problem. These improvements can really assist you with your Search Engine Optimization Efforts.

Image Tags – Another great SEO tool, image tags help search engines better understand what your images are showing customers.

Improvements to One-Page Checkout – We’ve improved our one-page checkout process to make sure you’re customers can check out easier than ever.

Closed Store Feature – Allows you to temporally shut down your store from the administrative area.

MoneyBookers Payment Gateway – Pinnacle Cart is now integrated with the MoneyBookers payment gateway.

Amazon Simple Pay – We’ve added Amazon Simple Pay to our list of supported payment gateways.

Get the jump on your competition and reserve your place in our design queue now!

I spent many years in the automotive business, ok, I was a car salesman and yes I know you just rolled your eyes. The video below brought back memories of my car selling days. It also sums up a lot of what designers deal with today. One of my designers sent me this video this morning when we were discussing scope creep. Scope creep is… well, just watch the video below.

With eBay making so many changes and so many eBay sellers becoming unhappy now may be the best time to start an eCommerce website. A while back eBay was a great place to get your feet wet so to speak with selling online, you could open up an eBay store, customize it and get sales almost instantly and actually make some profit. Starting an eCommerce website took a little longer, almost like a steam locomotive, it had to build up steam and there was some time before you could really see sales from it.

We are not seeing that now, we are seeing a lot of people doing a lot of work on eBay only to make a small profit, things do change. In my opinion if it’s not broke don’t fix it but who am I? The bottom line is even back in eBay’s prime when life was better on eBay you were still in business with eBay. You did most of the work, the listing, the advertising, the packing, the shipping and the good folks at eBay sat back and collected a profit plus they were partners in your customer base.

Several years ago there were some top power sellers that left eBay, they took the money they spent in eBay fees per month and put it toward internet marketing, pay per click and different things. They were able to double in one year what they did on eBay. Personally I think more people should have followed their example then.

With the rise in popularity of social media marketing there has never been a better time to make the transition from eBay to your own eCommerce website. You will not only save in eBay fees but you will also own 100% of your client base. You will also be building an asset that later on you can sell or pass down to someone else unlike an eBay business that you don’t really have ownership to.

If you have not started selling on eBay yet and you’re just thinking about it you may want to think long and hard, there are other options out there. If you do currently have an eBay store you do want to take advantage of what you have if you are making sales. Spend a little time and money to make it professional but keep in mind not to put all your eggs in one basket. Focus on the long term goal of your own website and build something that will belong to you and only you.

I thought I was done ranting about the people offering cheap design services but I guess I’m not. I think out of all the things online this is probably the worst thing, I will go as far as saying these people and companies are scammers.

I did another Google search and I came up with some great stuff, here are just a few:

Web Design at $10/hr
Web Design/Programming NO Freelance
Satisfaction Guaranteed, Staff 80+

This is great! 80+ staff all working for $10 an hour, wait, has to be less than $10 an hour because I’m sure for a staff that large they have some overhead, right? Maybe it’s just me but don’t McDonald’s pay almost as much per hour?

Web Designers - $199
xxxxxxxxxxxx.com 100% Full “Custom” Web Design. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed!

Really? $199 and it’s fully custom and 100% satisfaction? Oops, what about the 228 rip off and scam reports?

The bottom line is that cheap website designs that will do something for your business other than destroy it just don’t exist!

As a consumer please educate yourself and ask the following questions before you choose a designer:

• What research will you do?
• Will you research my competitors?
• Will you research my target market?
• Will it really be custom or are you using a pre-made template?
• Will you be able to assist me with updates and additions after the project is done?
• How will you help me market my website?

This list could go on for a while but the questions above will get you started.

I have done professional website design and owned Proimpulse for more than eight years but it seems we never stop getting calls and emails from unhappy people that went the cheap route to get started then had to get a professional to clean up the mess.

I will go on record saying that it takes a little money to get a professional website and it also takes money to market that website unless you are an internet marketing expert then you will still have your time involved.

Falling for the myth that you can go into business on the internet for a couple hundred dollars will get you nowhere fast. On the flip side if you work with a professional spend money for quality work and service I can promise you that your efforts will pay off seven fold.

We have decided to give away an eCommerce website and one year hosting in a drawing that will be held after March 29th. This is a fully functional eCommerce website using the same software that we use for all of our eCommerce websites. It’s packed with features and one of the most SEO friendly shopping carts on the internet.

You also get one (1) year of hosting free.

You can read more about it and enter here.

You only have until midnight on Sunday March 29th to register.

The winner will be posted here after March 29th.