Pinnacle Cart

Pinnacle cart has built the new system into their latest cart.  You’ll need to upgrade to 3.7.11 to do so, but as you know their upgrades are fairly easy with one click of your mouse.  Simply backup your site, and apply the upgrades.  You may need to re-do a few of your customizations, but from what I have seen so far the upgrade doesn’t affect templates all that much.  There is some talk in the forms of back-porting the module to earlier versions, but that may be more work than actually upgrading.

X-Cart

Unfortunately X-Cart is a different story.  For anyone who has ever attempted an upgrade, you know X-Cart upgrades are not really upgrades at all but completely new branches, so upgrading usually isn’t an option for anyone with a custom store.  If you are running version 4.3.x or higher, you are fine, FedEx will continue to run.  We asked them to provide a patch for clients running versions earlier than 4.3.x, but of course they declined.  Luckily we have a strong group of Third Party vendors that work with X-Cart and handle things like this.  In this case, it is BCS Engineering that has volunteered to back-port the FedEx changes.  Drop them a line at support @ bcsengineering . com (remove the spaces) and they will update you as to the progress and cost of the add-on.

Questions?  Feel free to email us.

4.1.x branch:
-some known problems related to anonymous accounts
-protection from unallowed access to back-end, using queries (formed in a special way) has been added

4.2.x – 4.4.x branches:
Security improvement for server variables and adaptive.php script

SEVERITY
Minor

IMPACT ON 4.1.x versions
A malicious user can gain access to address info for anonymous accounts.
A malicious user can gain access to the application back-end.

IMPACT ON 4.2.x – 4.4.x versions
A malicious user can gain access to the application back-end with a complex SQL injection

While they deem the threat ‘minor’, it is a good idea to apply the patch anyway.  If  you are one of our clients and would like the cart patched, please drop me an email and we’ll add you to the list.  It is a LONG list already, so please be patient.

- Connect to Quickbooks
- HTML Widgets feature
- Login / register with Facebook
- FedEx API updates (IMPORTANT IF YOU USE FEDEX!!)
- Wholesale Central integration
- Ability to expire admin accounts
- Beanstream payment gateway
- Securenet payment gateway
- Product export now includes option to export product inventory data
- Mobile site logo
- Various fixes to remove deprecated functions in php 5.3

The release also includes a number of bug fixes, but nothing really worth mentioning in that area.  The key here is the FedEx API update, which is essential as FedEx is retiring their old API shortly.  Right now they have not mentioned any plans to backport the fix to previous versions, but there is some chatter in the forums about really pushing for that.  Many users have highly custom carts that are extremely difficult to patch, so hopefully this will be released as well.

Another big change is a complete revamped admin area.  Some like it, some hate it, but it is definitely 100% different than the old admin area.  Overall this seems like a good upgrade and I recommend proceeding with it if your site isn’t too custom.  Complete release notes are here if you are interested:

http://www.cartmanual.com/update-3711-R1.shtml

Qualiteam (the maker of X-Cart) opted to take another direction and produced a module called X-Payments that worked OUTSIDE of X-Cart – allowing the customer to enter their data in a certified application and not in the cart itself.  An interesting idea for sure, but the downside is that it adds a step to the checkout process, and it costs $1200.  Until now, not many people took them up on this offer as their hands weren’t being forced by their Merchant Banks, so they continued to use a regular payment gateway from within X-Cart.  While this was technically illegal, no one was enforcing it, so it wasn’t a priority.

That seems to be changing now, as more and more Merchant Banks are requiring it, and penalizing or outright dropping customers who do not comply.  And in a move that will certainly start forcing  people’s hands, Qualiteam has announced that they will completely remove all internal payment gateways from their software starting with the next release (4.4.6).  That means that the only way to use X-Cart will be in a way that is PA-DSS compliant (external payment gateway or X-Payments).  Apparently this move was due to some pressure from the credit card companies to not offer a way to circumvent the PA-DSS regulations – smart on their part.

Confused?  You are not alone.  Feel free to drop us a line if you have questions about how to make your store compliant.  Please don’t take this lightly, or you may find yourself without a way to process credit cards when your Merchant Bank drops you for not being compliant.

We integrate Rich Snippets into our Pinnacle Cart and X-Cart designs by default, but if I have a free moment in the next few weeks I’ll put up a ‘how to’ article. You can find out more about Rich Snippets and how to integrate them by reading Google’s Article.

There are a few ways that a user can pin a product – they can add a widget to their browser toolbar, they can share an existing pin, or they can click on a ‘pin it’ button which you add to your product detail pages.  Adding the button is a little tricky, but we have worked out how to do it for both X-Cart and Pinnacle cart.  I’m sure Pinnacle cart will add it to their templates in the next update, but if you are one of our clients and need it done for X-Cart or Pinnacle Cart, just drop us a line!  Here’s an example of how it looks on one of our customer’s sites.

I warn you, Pinterest can be addictive, so don’t blame me for the countless lost hours pinning away!

Ryan Design Studio LLC
410 Pond Point Avenue
Milford, CT 06460

Phone number will remain the same.  Thank you!

As the new year gets rolling, it is a good time to think about those long awaited updates to your site.  Social media is huge, so if you aren’t taking advantage of it now is the time.  Like buttons, selling on your Facebook page, Google +1, these should all be a part of your e-commerce site.  Pinnacle Cart has all of these features and more built-in, so why not finally take the plunge and update to a modern, fully featured shopping cart system?

For those of you who are already on Pinnacle, we have a couple of new things to offer.  First, we have a customer reward point module that we just finished testing. For those of you familiar with the Reward Point module for X-Cart, this one works very similarly.  The cost is $200 installed.

We are also finishing up an Order Editing module which will allow you to modify orders after they come in.  You can adjust costs, products ordered, shipping methods, etc.  Stay tuned for more on that module.

Look forward to working with you in 2012!

Hope you all have a great Christmas!

- Designers and Artists sections (behave like Manufacturers)

- Custom Upload for detailed images, Designers and Artists

- Ajax product finder

- Front Page Slideshow integration

- Completely custom product detail pages

- “Custom Fields” module which lets the user define and add additional fields per product

- Disqus integration (for product reveiws/comments)