Product Reviews

Actinic Catalog and Business 5 are the latest incarnations of the popular 'shop in a box' software. They not only enable you to set up an e-commerce shop easily without any HTML or programming skills, but more importantly will allow you to process the flood of orders that you hopefully will receive from your online shop.

I've been using Actinic Catalog in anger on a live site since version 3 and, although version 4 offered improvements, the problems involved in upgrading an existing customised site to version 4 meant I for one baulked at the task. The upgrade process meant you had to go through your site and reapply all the changes you'd made to the supplied templates - an onerous task not helped by the difficulty in finding the correct template.

To its credit, Actinic took these criticisms on board and has done a lot of work trying to fix them. If you thought that there were few worthwhile improvements between version 3 and 4, prepare to be pleasantly surprised by version 5. There's been an enormous amount of work done, certainly helped by Actinic having a much larger programming team than before.

There are significant changes to almost all areas, except the server-side code, which has been kept almost the same, running as it does in Perl. Before we look at the new features, let's deal with the install routine and, unfortunately, the first brickbat. During installation, the program asks if you wish to upgrade an existing site. I selected this and all seemed to be fine, the program keeping the old installation intact and installing into a new folder.

However, the conversion of the site is actually done the first time you run the application. When this was done there were a couple of error screens and, after clicking through these, I was eventually presented with my data and all my configuration settings successfully imported into the new Actinic Business database.

Feeling brave, I asked the application for a preview and was disappointed to be presented with a browser window with a chunk of broken code in it. Now, to be fair, this import routine does work with many version 3 and 4 sites and, if you're one of the lucky ones, you'll only have a small amount of work to get yourself up and running. In fact, after studying the files I sent it, Actinic came back with a solution that involved some code copy and pasting, which seemed to fix things and I was able to preview my old site as it should look, but under version 5.

In many cases, as there's so much new with this version, you'll wish to use the opportunity to sort out the design and redo things. Whereas before, with version 4, you were presented with the Herculean task of redoing all your changes, version 5 offers several improvements to make this task a lot easier. It's fair to say that this is, and always will be, a job for the developer or serious user and not for the casual user. However, if you're serious about your online presence, then some degree of customisation of the wide range of supplied templates is required.

Previously, it was difficult to find the right template to edit and, while Actinic has kept the old user interface, it's added a new graphical interface where you can preview the page. As you move over elements on the page they light up; if you then click on an element, the code for that template is opened up in Notepad for you to edit and resave. While you still have to know your way around HTML to customise it this far, the improvement to this process in version 5 is, in my opinion, worth the upgrade alone. Having said that, this level of customisation may not be necessary for many customers, as the themes supplied have both increased in number and been enhanced in quality; every theme is easily customisable, with colours and images being changed through simple dialog boxes. When setting up Actinic on a machine you can decide if the user can alter the catalogue items, handle orders and know whether they're able to alter the design of the site. This stops accidental changes being made by inexperienced operators.

Revamped navigation

To help beginners and other users, Actinic has revamped its Navigator, the utility option that takes you through the different stages in setting up and running an Actinic Catalog Web site. Navigator displays the stages in setting up and running an online store in the form of clickable flow diagrams. Each clickable object opens up the relevant page in the application, so you can work your way through easily. This is in contrast

When setting up to sell over the Internet you can offer various payment methods, and Actinic makes this easy with predefined types that also include several of the popular Internet Payment Providers such as SecPay, NetBanx and WorldPay. These companies will interface your Web site with the credit card houses and enable your site to authorise credit card transactions. You can even instruct it not to accept certain types of payment for orders from certain countries. Actinic has carried this even further by having service providers for shipping as well. So the system not only knows about the shipping rates, but the buyer is emailed a reference number so that they can track the shipping of their goods via the carrier's Web site. The first carrier company that Actinic has integrated in this way is UPS, but unfortunately for us in Europe it's only available for customers in the US and Canada to date. Come on, Actinic, let's have some of this cool functionality for UK carrier firms.

Actinic's product has always excelled above most of the competition because it makes it easy to build an online shop and provides the mechanism for handling the orders when they come. The order handling has been significantly improved in version 5. There's now stock monitoring with stock and reorder levels. There's also a wider range of reports that can be generated from the order-processing system as well as the ability for the system to generate an email to the buyer as soon as their goods have been marked as 'shipped'. Through Actinic Link (see enterprise, p235), accounting systems can now interface to the order-processing system of Actinic Business. Currently Sage Line 50 and Exchequer Enterprise are supported, with QuickBooks Pro being available soon.

While in the past Actinic's products built the shopping side of your Web site, if you wished to have other pages about your company, special offers, contact pages and the like you'd have to create these with one of the HTML design tools and maintain it this way. This meant there were two separate ways to maintain your site - hardly perfect. In version 5, all this can be done within Actinic Business. So a user familiar with the application can update the Web site, add special offers and so on, safe in the knowledge that they won't break the site. This is because all the changes are made to entries in the database, which then generates the HTML pages based on the predefined templates, rather that to raw HTML pages. Actinic calls this area of the Web site the 'brochure'.

Going back to the stock control side of things, you can now make the price of an item dependent on the price of its components, so if, say, the cost of the batteries changes, the cost of another product shipped with batteries is also adjusted. All stock information and data can be held on an external database, with Actinic linking to it. A previous complaint of Catalog was that once all this critical business information was entered into Actinic there was no easy way to extract it into another program. With linked data sources and excellent export data options, this criticism can at last be laid to rest.

Often you wish to offer different prices to special customers or offer trade and retail prices. This can now be done easily, simply by going to the View | Customer Accounts menu. Here you can set up a customer account with details about the pricing schedule that they'll be given. To each customer account you can assign buyers, each with their own password. You can even create a user-defined message for an item in each price band so that the users can be told how much they're saving if you wish.

When setting up your company details in Actinic Business there's now a Returns Policy tab where you can enter some text defining your returns policy. The previous versions of Catalog and Business all had a search facility on the Web site, but version 5 now allows you to customise this functionality to a large extent. You can allow price band searches, decide which pages the search option appears on, what properties of a product are going to be searchable and also how the search results will appear. This all adds up to a good, customisable search engine.

All in all, this upgrade is a major leap for Actinic. It's fixed the mess that was version 4, but rather than just take the easy option and release a bug fix disguised as an upgrade it's gone much further and added a lot of useful new features and functionality. By listening to customer feedback and acting on it, Actinic has created a product that's much easier to set up, customise and run. Without a doubt it's a must to consider if you're setting up an e-commerce Web site and want more than much of the competition are offering.