Marg PinnacleCart

theres not much positive to write about pinnacle cart expect it does the job.

This software if infected with ioncube, thus means you can not make changes to the software should you ever need to, so you would be held to ransom as and when the time comes, this makes it impossible to have your cart display the way you want it to, you will also be charged huge fees when you need to update the software. I bought pinnacle cart but unfortunately it was not secure and someone was able to send emails from my account without my knowledge, they wanted a substantial amount of money to upgrade their software even though thus was their fault in the first place. My advice is to use opencart which is free and open source and free for updates too.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Response from Craig Fox of Pinnacle Cart

Hello and thank you for taking the time to review our application, we do appreciate your feedback.

After reading your review over a number of times, it appears your organization is using a licensed version of our product. Yes, that version does use ion cube to encode many of the backed files in an effort to reduce distribution, prevent reuse of files and to keep the application functioning without incident. This encoding also has the added benefit of smoother upgrades as certain files cannot be modified. In all versions of the application, the HTML files are always open allowing you to visually customize your storefront to meet your branding standards.

We do let you know this upfront and give you the option of licensing a version that isn't encoded. What version you should use really depends on your needs.

As a hosted customer, upgrades and support are free. As a licensed user, support and upgrades are free for your first year. After that, you'll need to be on a support plan. I'm not sure what version of the application you're using, but if the application system code hasn't been changed and our updates are done regularly, I don't see a reason for a major expense in getting you to the latest version.

I can't speak directly to your situation until we understand more about the version you're on, but we do want to help.

I deeply apologize for the issues you've encountered and would ask that you reach out to our support team so we can come to a resolution.

The cart is a PHP cart we can modify. Few of these remain and few are solid. When we first used it, we were impressed by their updates and staying cutting edge. This went away. They now do everything overseas.

The cart is no longer compliant. Now it fails scans and their support is horrible and overseas.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Straightforward Admin Console, easy to use if you have some basic E-Commerce know how. Existing templates are great if you are in typical online retail type businesses. Support is responsive and helpful.

This is platform is not ideal if you want to customize in any way. It is also not ideal for Business to Business sales as it is not really structured for typical B2B type transactions. Also if you have a large number of SKUs, then the baseline functionality becomes clumsy to work with. Examples include: Picture naming structures are a little funky and no way to see whether there are photos associated with a product SKU, you have to manually "hunt and peck" for products missing SKUs. We started noticing some issues when we went over 10K SKUs. Also, we utilized their Professional Services for custom development and it was not well documented and they typically charge a small fortune and take 3-5 months to do any custom work. When using a 3rd party developer (who isn't charging a fortune and does not take months) they become unresponsive and difficult to work with.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Super Simple to use and set up, and if your needs are not complex, the support is good enough.

If you need custom features or a modern highly sophisticated system, this probably is not the system for you.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Easy to learn and offers an attractive solution

The recurring products app is new and still rather buggy. I would recommend not using it for at least another year, until all of the many issues are resolved.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?