I have no experience with Actinic but have used www.shopfactory.co.uk on many projects.

The product comes well within £1,000 with the product import and sales manager software add ons.

Easy to use, you will need some experience of HTML if you want to edit the tem,plates which are a bit basic in design.
The import feature works great for transferring data from excel to the product database.

There are a number of payment providers included, from the cheapest pgp which is free ssl to paypal et. al

The shopping basket works well and avoids the clutter of many other "off the shelf" products.

Finally for the search engines the code is structured well for each sub department to be spidered by the search engines.

A couple of my creations,

www.alacook.co.uk
www.felinedesigns.co.uk

Hope this is useful, unfortunately as with most software, you only get to know the pitfalls once you have begun building the site.

Actinic is a well established product so I would download the free evaluatuions for both products and have a test run first

Cheers
Steve

Ian,

Do give me a call, or ask your wife if she would like to call, for advice on Actinic...

We sell our own e-commerce platform which is enterprise grade and hence probably well outside the price point which you will be willing to bear for a personal set up site.

However, I can certainly talk you through the limitations of Actinic - there are some very clear and big ones - which you should at least be aware of before you go ahead. As others have said here it is a reasonable platform and certainly very inexpensive. It has some big benefits too (like fair scalability and reasonable search engine indexing which are both down to the fact that it's essentially a flat, non-database, site on the server) - but it has some pitfalls too. Again many of these pitfalls are due to the fact that it's based on flat pages on the server. I can explain these factors in plain english for you on the phone if you like.

We have 10 clients in total 3 of whom have upgraded due to hitting the problems and limitations intrinsic in Actinic, so we are very familiar with the reasons people upgrade. I can talk you through those and you can decide if they are things you need to worry about or not. It may push you to consider a few other database driven products.

Anyway, here's my number if you want to call: 0207 861 9866

Best of luck,

Jeremy

here is a new free e-commerce service: www.wosbee.com

See also: http://www.tech.co.uk/computing/internet-and-broadband/news/cebit-2007-start-up-a-webshop-with-wosbee?articleid=638542130

On 10:29:48 10 March 2004 Fuzzbox wrote:
>On 00:16:36 12 February 2004 thomaid wrote:
>>Anybody out there got any hot recommendations for
>>e-commerce platform software for an SME B2C site? My
>wife
>>is looking to set up an online store, and is looking
>at
>>what platform to run it on. Currently out in front is
>>Actinic, mainly by virtue of its visibility and
>partner
>>network - anybody have any experience/horror stories
>about
>>Actinic, or any other hot tips? Needs to be fairly
>>low-cost (probably sub-£1,000).
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Ian
>
>Actinic is very basic, however if you're looking for a
>bespoke e-commerce website well within your budget take a
>look at www.fuzzbox.net alternatively call 0800 061 2450,
>they can easily build you something within your budget, a
>typical example www.polkacards.co.uk.
>Sabina.

I've used a few e-commerce platforms and obviously each have their pros and cons. Overall Actinic has been the best solution I can find for sites with up to 10,000 products. If you are looking to setup for sub-£1000, actinic includes some great CSS templates which come as standard and can be customised easily to suite your needs. You will find it difficult to build a custom site with this kind of budget unless you are already an excellent web designer and don't mind investing your time. Most Actinic designers charge around 1800 quid to setup a site which you can import products into. Out of the box I would highly recommend Actinic since it is a fantastic product which can produces very scaleable and SE friendly sites. You'll struggle to find better and you cannot beat the technical support or the forum!!

Hi Ian,

Have you looked at Magento for this? We have had some good results with it.

Normally I would be *VERY* anti Open Source applications - but we have been pleasantly surprised in this instance...

We also have experience with Actinic and have not really had any horror stories. In some cases (certainly where there is an off-line shopping environment to consider) Actinic can be a very good low cost solution. However do think through it's architectural considerations first!

If you would like to discuss in more detail please drop me a note through our website and would be happy to share our experiences.

Kind Regards

Ed

www.n3wmedia.com