Hey everyone! Mike Rose here to tell you about the latest release of PinnacleCart, version 3.8.3!
We have been hard at work the past few months, cleaning up the codebase and fixing up bugs (as you will see in the full fix list below)! I wanted to take this time, however, to tell you about some of the new features and improvements that will help you with the design and functionality of your PinnacleCart eCommerce store, as well as a new selling option.
3.8.3 boasts support for:
- Built-in Form Builder
- Single Page Order Forms
- @import CSS rules (Think Google Fonts support)
- Unique class selectors
In 3.8.3 you are going to find these new features and improvements, complimented by about 55 bug fixes and around 32 improvements, with a few miscellaneous changes sprinkled here and there.
New Features
Form Builder
Finally, contact forms built into PinnacleCart natively! Currently in the 1.0 release, as we plan to build many enhancements, the new form builder allows you to create any number of forms including a”Contact Us” form directly from your control panel. Once the form is submitted, the admins are notified and the information is stored for easy retrieval.
This feature is a long time coming and we want to hear your feedback on:
- How to make it better.
- What you need to make it better for your business.
Our new form builder platform drops forms directly into your text pages and works with reCaptcha (prevents spam bots) out of the box. We plan on integrating more field option types, better form validation, the ability to respond to form entries, and more (including your feedback)!
To learn more on using this feature, head on over to our help center!
@import CSS Rules
Love Google Fonts? Who doesn’t? A simple change of fonts can really improve the design of your store. Ever wanted to use a custom font from say Google Fonts but found that it was difficult to do? Well, we adjusted our css compiler to better recognize @import css rules and move them to the top of all.css
To learn more about using @import css rules, check out our article on them.
Single Page Order Forms
Finally, we have added a brand spanking new featured called ‘Order Forms’. Order forms allow you to send potential customers to a dedicated checkout screen that already has the products predetermined, including the product quantities if you like! We feel this feature is especially useful for store owners who may only have a few products to sell and want to get their products to a conversion page as soon as possible. Order forms are also especially useful for targeted product email campaigns or creating a special purchase order for a client. The sky’s the limit with this feature and just like with our new forms, we want to know how to make it better for you!
To get an idea of how these new order forms work, head on over to our support center .
Unique Class Selectors
To help facilitate more unique designs, we have added unique css classes to the base templates at the product, category, page, and manufacturer level. This is definitely something all of you front end developers out there should love!
To see how to utilize these classes, check out this help center article.
Check out the full release notes here.
We Want to Hear From You!
We’re always looking to understand how we can work towards making PinnacleCart more relevant for your business and day-to-day operations. In the past, we have had the option for you to submit a feature request over at https://www.pinnaclecart.com/contact-us, but what we don’t get out of that approach is the genuine understanding of how and why it helps your business. This is something I am personally looking to improve on. Now, for any feature requests that I see coming in, plan to hear from me. I want to understand not only the feature, but why this feature or logic helps you. Ultimately, it is up to us to provide you with the tools to be successful. There is no singular group of people better qualified to educate us in this goal than you! Who knows, we may even be able to name a release after your company, due to all the awesome and insightful input you sent our way. “Now presenting PinnacleCart version 3.10, The Penwa” has a pretty solid ring to it, I think! We will be introducing more comprehensive outlets for feature requests soon, but in the meantime, please feel free to fill out the contact form over at https://www.pinnaclecart.com/contact-us , or email me at featurerequests@pinnaclecart.com. Looking forward to hearing from you all!
Coming Soon – Business Intelligence Reports
Alongside feature enhancements and new features, PinnacleCart is soon going to offer a new reports system and new dashboard for the admin area, including exportable reports! To effectively grow your business you need to be able to turn information into actionable items that improve traffic and sales.
Some of the types of reports we are looking at:
- orders
- by payment gateway
- by channel
- by customer
- by state/region/country
- by time of day
- orders needing fulfilled
- refund rate
- return rate
- abandonment rate
- average interval between orders
- recently abandoned/failed orders
- gross revenue
- average order
- average items per order
- sales growth
- total products sold
- conversion percentage
- express checkout customers
- new customers
- repeat customers
- average time to buy (add to cart to purchase)
- customer lifetime value
- recent newsletter sign-ups
- new testimonials to review
- average testimonial score
- new form submissions
- new reviews to review
- top performing promo codes
- recently used promo codes
- average discount per order
- popular brands/manufacturers
- popular categories
- products commonly purchased together
- products commonly viewed together
- top performing products
- non-performing products
- products low on inventory
On top of those, we are interested to know what you would like to see built-in for business intelligence reports. We are planning to tie into Google Analytics and social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc… which we hope helps store owners get a full spectrum of knowledge about what is going on with their store. I can’t stress enough though that we want to hear from you so feel free to contact us on this at https://www.pinnaclecart.com/contact-us or email me at featurerequests@pinnaclecart.com.
PinnacleCart 3.8.3 Release Announcement – July 2016 – any questions?
Everyone once in awhile, someone from our bright and talented team will have enough time to put out an article related to technology, software, eCommerce or just living life on the web. You can find them here, for everyone to enjoy. Like what you’ve read? Please comment on it!
