PinnacleCart Review

Functionality is one of the strong points at PinnacleCart. While they may not have the largest selection of plugins and may not have the easiest-to-use dashboard, they keep everything straightforward and functional. You’ll be sure to find all of the tools you need to run your online store and then some. From forum apps to live customer support chat apps, they have a little bit of everything. The user interface is pretty basic, so beginners shouldn’t have much trouble getting by, and if you ever run into any issues, their support team provides training and excellent assistance. Overall, PinnacleCart is an excellent website builder that you shouldn’t fear using.

Ease of Use

PinnacleCart is one of the easy-to-use platforms when it comes to launching an online store. Their simplicity of use allows you to rapidly set up an eCommerce business to begin selling products online quickly. Whether you own the products you want to sell or even if you plan on dropshipping, PinnacleCart has a solution for your specific needs. Their “Getting Started Guide” really helps out when you’re a beginner and have no clue where to begin. However, experienced users can choose to skip this guide. Once in the backend, everything is pretty straightforward with all of the main navigation labels on the left-hand side, rich text editors for posting products, and tons of reporting tools for analyzing data such as product views. PinnacleCart offers excellent ease of use and is simple even for beginners.

Functionality

From conversion-focused designs all the way to excellent marketing tools, PinnacleCart is packed with tons of useful features to get your business off the ground. While they don’t quite have as many features as some of their competitors, they definitely have all of the necessities to launch a successful business that looks amazing. One of the really unique features offered by PinnacleCart is the ability to synchronize your online store with QuickBooks, which is a tough feature to find on similar platforms. Overall, PinnacleCart offers great features, and unless you’re looking for truly custom functionalities, you should be satisfied with what they have to offer.

Just a few dozen apps are available to choose from at PinnacleCart. While this isn’t necessarily bad, it doesn’t quite compete with other eCommerce platforms online. Other similar platforms have hundreds of plugins on average, yet the ones available at PinnacleCart should still be enough to satisfy your needs. However, the limited number of apps means that if you find an app you like, and it ends up being poor quality, chances are you won’t find another app that does the same thing, so you’ll be stuck with the poor quality solution. Pricing is pretty much average and comparable platforms, but we didn’t find many free options, which means you’ll most likely have to pay for every plugin you use. When testing out the plugins at PinnacleCart, we were definitely left wanting more - a whole lot more.

While PinnacleCart definitely has a good selection of plugins and a pretty simple-to-use interface, their themes leave a little to be desired. They do have some good free themes worth using, but overall, the selection is rather poor. Not only do they have just a small selection of a few dozen themes, but to make matters worse, the quality isn’t all that great either. You should find some themes that work for your business, but don’t expect to find any themes that you fall in love with. Customizations can always be performed, allowing you to edit the themes to your liking, but this requires quite a bit of coding skills. If you’re not up for performing customizations yourself, this could result in expensive programmer fees. It’s probably worth taking the time to check out their available themes on their website before making a final decision on using PinnacleCart.

Overall, PinnacleCart is a good solution when seeking quality uptime and decent speed. While they don’t offer overly-optimized speed ratings, you will definitely enjoy the standard speed that comes built-into this platform. If you want to benefit from even faster loading times, the few optimizations required to achieve better speeds are minimal and rather simple for people with basic website management skills. Incident frequency is a little touchy since they don’t offer any type of status page, but according to our research, they don’t deal with too many complaints, which is definitely a good sign. When it really comes down to it, PinnacleCart is right on-par with most of their competitors and do not deliver poor quality servers. You will most likely be very pleased with the quality of their servers, the loading speed and the uptime unless you’re a seasoned expert expecting enterprise level optimizations.

Uptime

Ensuring that you have a quality eCommerce platform that you can rely on is crucial to running an online store. The uptime guarantee is a pretty good indicator at how often an eCommerce platform crashes. It happens on occasion, but if an eCommerce platform is known for crashing on a regular basis, you’ll want to avoid it. Fortunately, PinnacleCart is pretty good at staying online as they promise a 99.9% uptime. This is pretty much average, but it’s also very good, which makes PinnacleCart a reliable service that you can trust.

Incident Frequency

Without any sort of status page, PinnacleCart leaves us in the dark when it comes to finding out their incident frequency. So we sourced the internet to find PinnacleCart complaints that seemed to come back on a regular basis. One of the complaints we saw a lot was from new merchants with absolutely no experience building websites. They found the eCommerce software to be a little over-complicated when compared to other platforms. Another issue that came up a few times was having problems dealing with international payment gateways. Overall, PinnacleCart doesn’t have very many negative complaints filed against them.

Speed

We tried a few different websites hosted on PinnacleCart and we tested them using site speed tools. The results were average - not excellent, but not bad either. Most pages loaded in under 3 seconds with some actually loading in under 2 seconds, which is very good. They seem to be average and pretty similar to other eCommerce platforms. However, basic optimizations could go a long way towards reducing the loading times. Too many HTTP requests were being made, there didn’t seem to be any use of a content delivery network (CDN) and they didn’t seem to be using cookie-free domains.

PinnacleCart offers a great support team that’s available 24/7 to back you up when you need help. In most cases, simple questions can be resolved with a quick search in their knowledge base. The knowledge base is packed with simple tutorials, helpful articles, and backend walkthroughs, so you can easily get around and figure out how to perform certain tasks on your own. However, more complex questions can rapidly be dealt with over the phone or by contacting PinnacleCart via live chat. Less pressing inquiries can be dealt with via email using their ticketing system. A nice touch available at PinnacleCart is their emergency support, which allows you to deal with highly urgent issues almost immediately, no matter what time of day it is. However, your store must be unavailable, or customers must be unable to complete purchases to be considered urgent.

Support Availability

Having proper support when running into issues is very important, whether you’re running a small mom-and-pop shop online or even if you’re running a large enterprise. PinnacleCart doesn’t disappoint when it comes to customer support. They have multiple support channels available, including live chat, telephone, email, and a comprehensive knowledge base packed with tons of useful information. Their availability is average and very similar to other eCommerce platforms online. Phone and live chat support is available Monday to Friday from 6 am to 1 am PST, and email support is available 24/7. However, emergency support is available 24/7, 365 days per year by submitting a support ticket and selecting “Urgent”. Emergency support is only available if your store is down or if customers are unable to complete transactions.

Speed of Response

When it comes to responding to inquiries, PinnacleCart is pretty fast. They usually deal with your inquiries in a matter of minutes when calling them by phone or contacting them via live chat. We attempted to contact their support team on multiple occasions, and we never waited more than 10 to 15 minutes on live chat and never more than 5 minutes on the telephone. Email can take 6 to 8 hours depending on the time of day that you contact them - they seem to be slower to respond during the night. Nonetheless, they are pretty much the same as other platforms in the eCommerce industry, and they deliver fast, accurate responses most of the time.

Friendliness & Helpfulness

Support staff members should always be in a helpful state of mind, and their mood plays a major role in how we perceive the business as a whole. When attempting to contact PinnacleCart, we were always greeted by helpful individuals in good moods, making the entire experience much more enjoyable. We surfed the internet looking for other customer experiences with their staff, and no major complaints were made against the staff members themselves. While they always seem to be in a good mood, their support staff cannot deal with highly technical issues, resulting in your inquiries being escalated to more qualified experts. Nonetheless, basic inquiries were always answered quickly and with a positive attitude.

Telephone Support

Phone support is one of the main ways to get in touch with PinnacleCart when you have pressing issues at hand. Fortunately, you can call them locally if you live in Arizona or use the USA's toll-free number. International support phone numbers are also provided in case you live outside of the USA. Their support team, when called, is always glad to help and eager to respond to your inquiries. Most of our issues were dealt with immediately, and we never waited much more than 5 minutes before getting connected to a phone support agent. One of the downsides is that their phone support is only available from 6 am to 1 am PST time, so if you run into issues outside of those hours, you’ll either have to wait until the next day or contact them via emergency support using their support tickets.

Live Chat Support

Live chat used to be a luxury, but nowadays, a business that doesn’t offer live chat is behind on current trends. We tested some eCommerce platforms that didn’t offer any live chat support, but PinnacleCart does have a live chat. This makes it so much easier to quickly get answers to basic questions without having to call and without having to wait around for email responses. When contacting live chat support, they always provided quick answers, and they were always effortless to get in touch with. We never waited much more than 10 to 15 minutes, and we could easily tell that we were speaking to humans, not with automated responses.

Email Support

Finally, we want to share our experience with email support. PinnacleCart offers excellent email support that’s available 24/7. It’s the only type of support they offer at all hours of the day or night, so it must be a high-quality support channel. We contacted them a few times via email, and we always received quick responses. Most emails were answered in as little as 6 hours, but when emailing them during the night, we found that it could take up to 8 hours before getting a response. This is still above average, with some eCommerce platforms responding to emails in as much as 24 hours. Along with being fast at responding to our inquiries, the email support team was very helpful and always provided excellent support.

When it comes to choosing an eCommerce platform online, you want to make sure that you find the most affordable option without compromising your website's quality. PinnacleCart has excellent prices, but they remain very similar to the pricing of other platforms. The lack of a free plan really takes away from the whole experience - most eCommerce solutions offer a minimal yet free plan. It would also be nice to clearly understand the transaction fees rather than charging users for additional bandwidth and disk space usage. PinnacleCart does not have any hidden fees. Overall, they offer competitive pricing, which is pretty much average for the eCommerce industry.

Plans Pricing

PinnacleCart’s pricing plans are not the best, yet they aren’t the most expensive pricing plans either. They don’t seem to charge any transaction fees, but they limit bandwidth and disk space on the two cheapest plans, which is basically another way of charging transaction fees. One thing that we found was lacking at PinnacleCart was a free pricing plan. They don’t have a free plan, but they do offer a free trial so you can get to know the platform before spending any money. Their cheapest plan is “Start-Up”, the next is “Standard”, and the highest pricing plan is “Advanced”. They seem relatively similar, except the largest plan removes bandwidth and disk space limitations. Users can call for custom enterprise-level pricing plans.

Transaction Fees

PinnacleCart mentions that they do not charge any transaction fees regardless of the amount of product you sell. However, it’s important to keep in mind that most eCommerce platforms charge a transaction fee. They use a different name for it. For instance, PinnacleCart charges users for using additional bandwidth and disk space by having them move towards a higher pricing plan. This equals out to the same as charging transaction fees. If you plan to sell high-value items and don’t need as much traffic to make a good income, this platform is a great solution for your specific needs. However, if you sell tons of small-value items, this may not be the ideal solution.

Other Fees

We didn’t notice any hidden fees when using PinnacleCart. All of the fees were pretty straightforward to understand before signing up with them. There are no complaints online stating anything about hidden fees or odd charges, so it’s pretty much safe to say that PinnacleCart only charges the amounts that they list on their pricing plans page.

PinnacleCart was first launched in 2003 when two childhood friends came together to create a better eCommerce solution. Craig Fox and Mike Auger had dabbled with websites and online business before launching PinnancleCart, but neither of them had ever experienced great success. However, they shared the mutual opinion that all of the current eCommerce platforms lacked in most areas. They aimed to create a solution that would allow beginners to easily set up an online store without any coding skills while still benefiting from incredible performance and functionality.

They started in a hotel room with two of their friends. PinnacleCart took long nights to build and many months to complete. However, they soon launched one of the top-rated eCommerce platforms on the internet. PinnacleCart delivered marketing tools built into an eCommerce platform. They were the first of their kind, and this caused them to experience huge and rapid growth. Today, they have headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, and the head CEO is Michael Wolf.

PinnacleCart allows users to easily set up an online store and design it the way they’ve always wanted their store to look. With numerous features, adding various functions to your eCommerce business is easier than ever before. Plus, with a strong emphasis on marketing, PinnacleCart makes it easy for you to rank better in Google and other search engines, allowing you to gain more traffic via organic channels.

With constant improvements and regular maintenance of their existing features, PinnacleCart continues to strive as one of the leading options for choosing an online eCommerce platform. They cater mostly to small-to-medium businesses, but larger enterprises will also enjoy using PinnacleCart. Whether you want to dropship, sell white-label items or even open up an online store for your local boutique shop, PinnacleCart makes it all incredibly simple to achieve.

PinnacleCart is one of the solid eCommerce platforms you’ll want to look into if you’re considering launching an online store. You’ll especially enjoy PinnacleCart if you have high-ticket items and require less traffic since they replace their transaction fees with bandwidth and disk space usage fees. Their backend is pretty simple to understand, even for beginners. Plus, their customer support is capable of providing training as well as 24/7 support, so you’ll never truly be left on your own. Their themes leave a little to be desired, but they are free to use, so you can experiment with all of them without having to spend a dime. The one aspect we really disliked about PinnacleCart was their selection of plugins, which wasn’t terrible but was far from being impressive. Overall, compared to similar eCommerce platforms, PinnacleCart is pretty much average and delivers good features, but other website builders have achieved better overall platforms.