Product Reviews

When e-commerce first took off in the UK, just about the only way you could build your own Web shop was to wrestle with US-based software that really didn't do our wonderful Value Added Tax system much justice at all. In fact, most available on-line and off-line e-commerce software takes very little account of VAT peculiarities, which makes dealing properly with EU legislation pretty much impossible for UK Internet traders.

At last Actinic Catalog has joined the select few e-commerce products specifically designed to handle UK VAT. In fact, version 4 takes the software's tax and shipping calculation capabilities to previously unheard levels of sophistication.

Since 1997, UK-based Actinic has established itself as a major player in the e-commerce software market, and this latest release looks like it's setting the pace for others to follow. The company offers both end-user shop development software and business-to-business systems, along with a portal-based 'shopping mall' for on-line providers. Actinic Catalog is the end user, off-line, shop-building system, designed to enable the creation of a fully working e-commerce Web site via simple-to-complete forms and dialogs.

Off-line simply means the software can be purchased shrinkwrapped in a box, and installs on your local hard disk - rather than residing on a server, and only being available when you're on-line via a dial-up connection. The resulting Web shop is also output as pre-built HTML pages (as opposed to an ASP database link), ready for publishing and uploading to your designated host.

Actinic Catalog loads with a tree-like display of your shop, showing multiple departments under the overall shop settings and individual products under the departmental branches. To create your on-line store you simply complete a range of forms detailing the contents of your site, the parameters you wish to set for trading style and the items you want to sell.

To help find your way around, this latest version of Catalog also features a pop-up Navigator - an overlapping window providing a graphical flow chart of frequently used options. Once you're proficient, the Navigator can be turned off, and you can use the comprehensive drop-down menu for setting parameters, and the tree display to edit department and product details. You simply double-click the branch required to access product and department properties, dragging and dropping items and their options to create the layout required.

Secure trading

Before Actinic Catalog can build and publish your shop, you'll need to tell the software about yourself and the way you want to trade. These business settings include company name, address and contact details, along with which currency to use and the payment options you would like to offer your customers.

Here you can choose from 'cash on delivery', 'cheque on delivery', 'invoice with order', 'invoice with payment before delivery' and 'credit card details sent separately'. Of course you can also opt to accept credit cards and allow on-line credit card authorisation, with Actinic offering links to a choice of major processing institutions such as WorldPay, NetBanx, SECPay, Secure Trading and DataCash.

If you want to use your existing PDQ-type merchant facilities for processing credit card payments manually, then Catalog can encrypt the orders complete with credit details when you download. Secure encryption is based on Actinic's own 128-bit algorithm, but you can choose standard SSL if you like.

Most e-commerce software will email the shop owner with customer orders, and if these include credit card details then a proprietary encryption system such as PGP will be employed. Once received, these emails will then need to be processed manually. Actinic Catalog, on the other hand, arrives with a full order-processing system as part of the application, so at the press of a button orders are downloaded from your Web site (using the built-in encryption) and offered for delivery, despatch, invoicing and payment processing.

Also new to this version is the ability to create back orders if your stock is insufficient to fulfil the order, plus the stock monitoring facility will keep your Web site updated with how many of a particular item you have available. You can even choose to suspend customer ordering of out of stock products if required.

Taxing business

In order to deal with UK and EU tax situations correctly, e-commerce software must cope with one of several possibilities. To illustrate let's keep things simple and say the sales of merchandise and despatch of product will both be UK-based. First of all the customer could also be based in the UK, which means they'll be charged VAT as normal.

If the customer is based outside the UK, but inside the EU they'll still be charged VAT as normal, unless they're a business-to-business customer and can produce a tax registration number - then they can be charged VAT free. Incidentally, your software should ask for this number before allowing tax-exempt goods within the EU.

If the customer is outside the EU, in other words the rest of the world, then life is simpler still - they don't need to be charged VAT at all. In theory then, your e-commerce software should at least calculate tax based on where the customer lives and is buying the goods.

Actinic Catalog's VAT facilities are excellent, but getting them to work

ADVERTISEMENT

will involve some setting-up before the software can perform correctly. First of all Actinic offers a simple tax calculation, you get a choice of two types of tax, with options for a description, prompt message and tax rate for each. If you want to operate properly within the UK and EU, however, then you'll need to get a little more sophisticated.

Catalog's advanced tax calculation system means your Web shop can calculate exactly how or whether VAT should be levied, according to the location of the customer. Plus, you can allow for tax exception situations, and ask for the customer's VAT registration for confirmation of this at the checkout phase. To cope with the EU you can also display the cost in Euros and at least one other currency, and you can show prices as either tax inclusive or tax exclusive.

In order to handle all this functionality, Actinic Catalog has to get a little complicated when it comes to setting up tax regimes, and even the help system combined with the on-line manual doesn't make every last detail clear. You'll need to set-up tax zones, decide whether to apply tax by delivery address or invoice address, create tax percentage bands and so on.

Catalog's shipping cost calculation options are similarly sophisticated, using a combination of location zones, postage/delivery classes and weight range bandwidths to cope with extremely varied situations. You can also charge delivery based on total quantity or total value, or just charge a standard amount across the board if you wish.

Again to cope with EU VAT requirements, tax on the delivery charge can be calculated on a pro-rata basis across the entire order if you choose. Plus you can charge a 'handling' element, which can be based on a percentage of the shipping charge should you want to get clever. This is a very comprehensive interpretation indeed, and the only missing option is the ability to interface to an external file provided by your delivery supplier.

Cataloguing your products

Once you've got the basics of how you do business, it's time to add the products to the catalogue. You can import a file of existing items if you have one, complete with departments or sections if required. Each section can have its own look and feel, with options for layout being chosen from a pre-designed list of eight formats. For example, you can have product-descriptive text down the left-hand side of the item image, or the right, or centred, or no picture at all if you like. You can also browse for your own defined section layout template.

Each item has the usual fields to fill, such as a short name, a longer description, the price and whether the item is taxed or not. You can set stock levels for automatic monitoring, such as the minimum stock level that will illicit a warning, and you can set the quantity of items in stock below which to suspend ordering on the Web site.

New product features in this version include some interesting enhancements to item attributes. First, you can choose to create item 'components'; these could be used where the product is an assembly of other products, for example. Each component represents one sub-assembly, and can have its own attributes and choices. More importantly, each sub-assembly can be associated with another product in the Catalog using what Actinic calls 'permutations'. However, attributes can still be used for simple choices such as colour, type, style, quantity or size.

Using a combination of components and attributes, you can arrive at choices for a product that define a pricing for each item, based on a standard price, the sum of its components, or both added together. Again flexibility comes at a price in terms of ease of use and the length of time required to implement your stock list, but even so, this is a very flexible way to alter the final cost according to the options chosen.

Looking good

Once the shop and product catalogue are ready to go, it's time to decide how your Web shop should look, and thankfully this latest version of Actinic Catalog arrives with far more design themes to choose from. There are 26 pre-defined layouts and over 50 colour palette options to choose from. You can also insert raw HTML into most text fields and edit the colour for backgrounds, buttons, text and so on.

Custom options can be created and linked to external HTML files for more drastic alterations in design, and these additions are included in your site via the comprehensive template editor. Here you can get at the Actinic Catalog templates used to parse your shop details and create the resulting Web site - just about anything is possible for those with a little programming experience.

When everything is in place all you need to do is preview your site on the local PC to see if it looks how you expect, publish to the Web and you're in business. Your ISP host server doesn't have to be very large - provided you have writeable access to the CGI-bin folder for the Actinic scripts to reside and the latest version of Perl is installed, all should be well. Unless you buy Actinic Catalog from your ISP, then you'll need to get involved in the network upload settings, but Actinic supplies a ready-made template with setup details for many ISPs.

Actinic Catalog was already looking like the e-commerce software to beat in the off-line catalogue builder genre, and now it looks even better. The cost is about right for the features on offer for the end user. A special licence to manufacture multiple shops at a reduced rate would be very welcome for the developer though. The fact that the merchant must have a copy of Actinic Catalog to download and process orders also limits Web-designer appeal.

Regardless, version 4 has been well worth the wait, and this software is now sufficiently ahead of the pack to warrant a very hearty recommendation. If you want maximum control over design, shop features and product options without programming - and at a sensible price - then Actinic Catalog 4 must be it.