Pinnacle’s journey to eCommerce excellence
Giving our customers the opportunity to make use of a B2B eCommerce platform has always been part of Pinnacle’s digital transformation journey and we wanted to ensure execution in excellence. Our team spent a significant amount of time researching and scoping all the options available to us before deciding on Magento2.
Magento2 proved to be the most superior solution, being used by an estimated 20% of online platforms worldwide - offering flexibility, scalability, and an expansive backend user interface. With this desired platform in mind, we then awaited our new Sage X3 migration which took place in early 2020 in order for us to integrate our Magento2 platform into our new ERP system to allow for seamless transacting. In July 2020, we launched our new Pinnacle website and by April 2021 we had successfully completed the full synchronous order integration into Sage X3. Our objective with our new website was to offer our resellers rich product images and specifications which they would be able to plug into their own online platforms through utilising either our XML, CSV or API files, giving them seamless and updated pricing and product data. The new website also allows full eCommerce transacting and payment on account, Credit Card, or EFT with our target delivery time being between 24-48 hours. With over 60 brand pages we offer our resellers pertinent information on our respective vendors as well as videos, product insights and brand management detail.
April 2021 proved to be an integral part of Pinnacle’s digital transformation journey as we kicked off our ESD offering, which allows resellers to purchase Microsoft software electronically at the click of a button. Although this is still fairly new to our platform, we have seen a great uptake in these transactions.?
We still have a long way to go before reaching our final destination of eCommerce excellence and our team is constantly looking for ways to improve our user experience, knowing that there is always room for improvement. We are currently working on updating our categories for ease of navigation and ensuring that we take our customer feedback into consideration - as ultimately, we want only the best for our resellers.
Following in the footsteps of our Pinnacle website, we also launched our new Proline website in May 2021. Although the website is a non-transactional site, it is aimed at sharing new product ranges and specifications with our resellers, enabling them to successfully upsell our local brand to their clientele. We have also just launched our vertical websites, Datanet and Pinnsec, to ensure we offer our infrastructure and security reseller the same exceptional experience on the Magento2 platform.
We truly appreciate our reseller support and patience throughout this journey and we are determined to continually improve these platforms for our stakeholders.