Having had a look at various options for redevelopment of an ecommerce website, I have pretty much decided upon Actinic or Erol.

I'm leaning towards the latter, as it should be easier to retain a (bespoke) look and feel, and since Erol sites appear to be generally better looking. I'm aware though that Actinic has some great features and so, thought I'd ask you all if it's six and half a dozen, or if there are any major differences between the two that I may have missed?

Thanks

FR

On 19:49:16 21 September 2008 FrancesRooney wrote:

Having had a look at various options for redevelopment of an ecommerce website, I have pretty much decided upon Actinic or Erol.

I'm leaning towards the latter, as it should be easier to retain a (bespoke) look and feel, and since Erol sites appear to be generally better looking. I'm aware though that Actinic has some great features and so, thought I'd ask you all if it's six and half a dozen, or if there are any major differences between the two that I may have missed?

Thanks

FR

Hi FR

As an agency that is constantly looking at ecommerce applications all of the time we have found two major issues with both of these products:

1) The rely on access as the database for the system (this causes the sites to be slow and we have clients who have used this in the past and have found issues with the system crashing when any load is placed on the system)

2) You are reliant on the actual PC you have the system installed on from a site management and order management perspectve. This means that your single point of failure is the PC which is not ideal.

As an alternative have a look at digishop. Example sites in the UK include:

www.anoushkag.com/store

www.bracketsrus.co.uk

www.indiain-infusion.co.uk

Garry

Thanks, but I wasn't really looking for open source. Also I'm not overly technical and find even Actinic and Erol a bit hard to use.

Ideally I'd like to have went with a hosted solution but all the decent ones are just that wee bit too expensive. I realise I'll have to spend a few thousand but not £10k or anything like that; and for the money I spend I want quite a lot of functionality.

I also like the fact that you're not 100% reliant on anyone else if you have a software solution.

Which is how I ended up with Actinic or Erol.

FR

I realise that Magento is, as far as open source goes, pretty powerful - I think both it and Volusion look very good.
 

However it seems to have an American feel; my customers are all UK based and I want to do well on Google UK rather than USA. Moreover it's important that customers don't look at Americanised terms and assume I'm not local.

FR

On 22:21:25 28 September 2008 inigomedia wrote:

Hi Frances,

I'd second the idea of looking into Magento in more detail.  It has a huge feature set and if you purchase a support package with the company that makes it, Varien, there's no reason to feel like you're completely reliant on them.

There's little that's particularly technical if all you need to do is add products, change prices and run orders.  We offer full installations of Magento from £3950+vat including design and payment service provider integration. 

You can see the Magento features at http://www.magentoecommerce.com/features/

There are also online demos of both the front end and the back end. 

Our aim is to make Magento more flexible and not just an installation and addition of products - which means a bit more customisation, but we can then bend and mould it to do what you need it to do.

Ultimately Actnic and Erol force you into their framework, but an open source solution like Magento allows you to add on to the system when the need arises because it's all based on PHP, a programming language known to thousands of web developers. 

If you're interested, do get in touch by emailing dan@inigo.net

Kind regards

Dan

I'd endorse what Tim says about translations packs, which in non-geek speak just means that you can make the site run in UK English rather than US English. 

You may need to put up with some of the back end in California tech terminology, but the customer facing aspects can all be customised to say what you want your customers to see.

Should also add that Inigo are Magento Partners too.

Dan