Pinnacle Cart is a PHP Shopping Cart application which has been greatly growing in popularity recently.  The most distiguishing feature that we discovered about Pinnacle Cart is it’s simplicity of operation.  We’ve been subjected to tons of different shopping carts.  Anything from the Open Source realm to the very expensive and even on a rare occasion the home grown.  It always seems that most shopping carts require you to have some kind of complicated understanding of the IT world in order to maintain it, or at the very least keep a developer on a retainer close by.

With Pinnacle Cart the hard core developers and IT people that often preach about how they never use anything but the commandline, might not find Pinnacle Cart to be has hard core as they might like.  But for anyone that wants a great shopping cart that is easy to customize and design for, that is easy to maintain and operate and that allows you the time to work on the important aspects of your business, this is it.  Stop pounding your head against the wall trying to figure out where the HTML ends and the template code begins, it might be a better plan to start with something that just plain works.

To quote their website they say:

Our management team has over 30 years of combined sales and marketing experience. We are not techies, by nature. Our background in advertising, marketing and web design has given us a unique perspective on the design of this platform. We created shopping cart software that is easy to use and extremely effective at selling your products.

And that is exactly what the makers of Pinnacle Cart have done.  Easy to use and extremely effective at selling your products, is just what every website owner is looking for.

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What is really impressive is that they include many features that are add-ons for other shopping carts.  Impressive upselling capabilities such as recommended products, customers also bought and buy x get y free features are all right at your finger tips ready to use.  Customer relationship management is all built right into the system.  Being able to send newsletters, product updates, allow customers to save carts are all important features.  Pinnacle Cart has even included an impressive one page checkout allowing website owners to minimize cart abandonment for visitors that hate lengthy checkout screens.

If you haven’t taken a look at Pinnacle Cart yet, it’s definitely worth the time.  They offer a demo to experience Pinnacle Cart on their website.  Take a poke around and decide if it’s the shopping cart for you.  And if you decide to combine a powerful shopping cart with a powerful hosting account such as HardHat offers, you will be impressed with the results.

A university did a study not to long ago where they calculated the average conversion rate of this kind of email is approximately 0.0008% or some ridiculously low number like that, I may have forgotten a zero in there as if there wasn’t enough of them.  In the name of research they supposedly sent some of their own emails through a bot network.  This is a lot of computers like your own at home that are infected with trojans or spyware that can actually be remotely controlled and used to send spam with, which on a side note is the reason why many ISP’s are blocking port 25 these days.

So even with this conversion rate being ridiculously low, Spammers don’t decide that it’s not worth it, instead they figure they just need to send out many more emails.  Online statistics estimate that about 94% of all email sent, is spam.  The only way we can ever really stop this trend is to do everything we can to block it, ignore it, or stop clicking on the darn things.

So how much is it really costing your company?

Well most people will admit that it is a very big nuisance, but what does it actually cost us?  I know that without proper filters in place I would waste a ton of time on it.  Let’s say every morning you spend about 15 minutes clearing out your spam that you received over the previous evening.  Then lets say you spend another 15 minutes scrolling through your spam folder looking for false positives from the freebie spam filter you’re using that doesn’t work very well.  Then let’s say that at least twice during the day spam comes into your email box and you check the mail to find out it’s nothing and then it takes you 15 minutes to really focus back on whatever you were just working on.

So here we are with a pretty conservative estimate of 1 hour every day wasted on spam messages.  If we estimate 22 working days a month, that’s 22 hours a month.  If you have 5 employees that’s 110 hours a month in your company being wasted on spam.  Just at minimum wage alone we’ve just successfully flushed about $770 each month.

What the best option to recoup this money?

Most of the freebie filters block just as much legitimate mail as the mail you don’t want, which can waste just as much time.  Most companies view expenses as expenses, they cost money, so we want to cut costs to be more profitable correct?

This might work in most scenarios, but as you can tell a cost effective spam solution can have a great return on investment.  The best services out there are actually a separate service from your email and/or web hosting.  Normally it is a service that is a separate server that you will change your MX record to point to so that all mail goes to it first, then it delivers all clean mail back to your actual email server.  This saves you time from even having to download the bad mail in the first place.  There are many services out there that can perform this function.

HardHatHosting offers one of those services with their Enterprise Spam Filtering.  At only 99 cents per email account per month and a false positive rating of one in one million and filtering rules written by real humans updated every 5 minutes, it’s easy to see how a company can recoup the wasted money of lost time and salaries of dealing with spam.

We have a web page set up with more information about our Enterprise Spam Filtering, or as all our customers are well aware pick up the phone and give us a call, we’d be more than happy to answer all your questions and even give you a 30 day free trial.