http://OrganicMarketOnline.com
We recently had a client approach us with a desire to create an E-Commerce website that revolved around the sale of organic products that were selected as “best in class” for sale to the general public. Many of these brands are difficult to find and require driving to a brick & mortar specialty store. This website helps people order these products and get them shipped to their home or office in a few easy steps. This case study revolves around the implementation of Pinnacle Cart, a PHP based E-Commerce shopping cart that has many cutting edge features other online shopping carts do not. One of its greatest benefits is the plug-ins to seamlessly integrate with other popular E-Commerce applications that our customers need to compete in today’s marketplace.
Branding & Design
The first phase of this project was to design all of the branding assets including the brand logo and color scheme. The logo went through multiple design directions and revisions, ultimately ending with a very clean, very versatile logo that not only promotes brand recognition, but can be used for print assets such as business cards, letterheads, email signatures, etc. This logo, and its color scheme, became the base that the entire website design was built from. By incorporating high quality images of organic products and natural/nature scenes, we were able to provide customers with the feeling that they were shopping in their favorite farmers’ market or a local organic foods bazaar, providing a high quality experience to people who demand this aesthetic.
Branding and Design for this project were provided by The Ultra Team.
All of the product images in the cart were cropped and enhanced by hand. This gives the whole site a very uniform feeling, making it easy for customers to find the products they need. We believe that clear and easy to view product images are the best way to let the products sell themselves to the customer. Our website navigation makes it easy for the customers to always know where they are on the website, as there is a breadcrumb trail through the product categories.
Security
PCI Compliance
Pinnacle Cart is one of the few shopping carts that is PA-DSS compliant, meaning that your E-Business can accept credit card payments and process them in a secure manner. The security of your store is now your personal responsibility. Pinnacle Cart is proud to be one of the few E-Commerce applications to be both PA-DSS (Payment Application-Data Security Standard) and PCI compliant. As a merchant hosting your own store, using a PADSS E-commerce system is going to become mandatory if you want to accept credit cards as payment. Merchants who are not PCI compliant are not only exposed to possible fines or penalties, but also run the risk of having their credit card privileges revoked. Do not run the risk of fines or losing the ability to utilize credit cards as a form of payment on your website.
SSL Certificate
When processing Credit Card Numbers on the internet, you must protect the information you send with a layer of encryption. OrganicMarketOnline boasts a high-grade 256 bit encrypted SSL certificate that will keep your customers protected from hackers. The certificate provides the https:// prefix as well as the defacto “Secure Lock” icon in the address bar to let your customers know their data is protected.
SEO Optimization
Pinnacle Cart features built in Search Engine Optimization which helps to move your website up in all of the search engine rankings. It gives you the ability to create your own custom URL structure (www.yoursite.com/CreateYourOwnURL.html) and manage these URL’s at the category, product, and page level. Most importantly, it features a valid W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) template design, aiding in allowing search engine robots to crawl and index your pages. Thanks to this, your website will be filled with easy to read, clean data for the robots and your websites’ ranking in the search engines will rise organically, meaning no SEO “tricks” (such as link farming - which will penalize you and your site if caught) are required.
7 days after the site launched, over 1,000 pages had already been indexed by Google. This was all prior to any marketing campaigns.
Product Management/Inventory Tracking
With Pinnacle Cart, product management has never been easier. You can sell both physical and digital products along with services right on your website. It enables you to sell any kind of digital products including pdf’s, videos, music files, etc. that are more popular now than ever before. The product management software supports UPC and SKU numbers, so you can keep track of your inventory on physical products, as well as your digital products. Another great feature is that Pinnacle Cart’s PM/IT software supports discount / coupon codes globally and at product level, so you can offer discounts to your most valuable customers to help generate increased revenue for your business or to just move old inventory out of your store. You can even export products to Google Base, BizRate.com, ShopZilla.com and more to let customers know about your store selection and your prices.
Customer Management
After you get your E-Commerce website up and running, you need a way to manage your clients that frequent your business. Pinnacle Cart has tons of features to help you do things like: send out product newsletters to your customers, create a customer address book, and integrated live chat. One of the more popular features is the One Page checkout, which is the fastest checkout in the industry. Combine this with Guest Checkout, a feature that allows people to checkout without creating an account, and your sales will be reaching new heights.
Affiliate Program
Pinnacle Cart is great if your E-Business runs an affiliate program. Pinnacle Cart is compatible with iDevAffiliate and other third-party affiliate programs including Linkshare, ShareASale, ClixGalore, Commission Junction and more, with new affiliate programs added on a regular schedule. Affiliate programs are common throughout the Internet and offer website owners an additional way to profit from their websites. Affiliates generate traffic and sales for commercial websites and in return receive a commission payment.
Anyone can sign up to become an affiliate. Affiliates receive custom designed banner ads to put on their site. As people click on the ads and make purchases from the cart, the Affiliate System keeps track of all transactions making it simple to manage your Affiliate sales force.
Analytics/Marketing
Pinnacle Cart knows that analytics are the lifeblood of any online business. That’s why it provides you with the ability to track customers, products, and advertisements - with seamless integration into Google Analytics and Google AdWords tracking tools. One great feature that is often requested (and is included in Pinnacle Cart) is charting visitors / hosts / revenue by month, to see where revenue is being made.
As for Marketing, Pinnacle Cart features the latest tools to help you connect with your customers on today’s most popular social networking / social media websites. It can help you to sell your products on Facebook for FREE using E-Commerce Plus. It also features integration with MailChimp to email your customers your latest marketing promotions and flyers. It even has popular features seen on sites like Amazon.com for recommending similar/compatible products to customers. If they have an account with you, it can recommend products they may like based on their purchase/view history.