An upgrade for the popular e-commerce package
The now annual refresh of the market-leading Actinic e-commerce family will be of interest to the thousands of small businesses using it to sell goods online.
The changes in Actinic v10 aren’t earth shattering, but do address a number of shortcomings and enhance the appeal of this already very popular product.
We used Actinic Business for our evaluation, which is the mid-range version able to handle large numbers of online transactions and mail and telephone orders. Actinic Catalog (£399+VAT) may be more suitable for smaller traders selling online only, but many may still prefer the Business product which comes with additional customer management and marketing tools, plus Sage 50 Accounts integration and optional support for Actinic EPOS.
Actinic Catalog and Business can both cope with up to 20,000 products, but are limited to a single site and just one user. If that’s a problem Actinic Business Plus is the answer (starting at £1,249+VAT) as this version can be extended to support multiple web sites managed by multiple users. An Enterprise Edition with SQL Server database integration is also available.
The same core software is employed regardless of version, requiring little more than a desktop PC running either Windows XP with Service Pack 2, Vista or Windows 7. Installation took just a few minutes on our test PC, and upgrading from a previous version proved equally painless. Existing customers who signed up to an Actinic Cover agreement will get the v10 upgrade for free. Others will have to pay £375+VAT.
Hosting choices As well as the Actinic desktop PC you will, of course, need a server to run your web store. Unlike some e-commerce products, however, you’re not tied to Actinic or a specific hosting company. Actinic can host the site for you from £15 per month for a small store, rising to £540 for a dedicated server, but if you already have a favourite provider you can use them instead, or use a web server of your own.
