Actinic Business 9 review

Actinic offers a range of e-commerce products, from the web-based Express, which costs £20 a month, to its "shop in a box" products such as Actinic Catalog and Business. Catalog is half the price but lacks some of the Business version's advanced features - check the website for details. Both install an application on your desktop that stores all the information about your website shop in a database. A slick interface to this data makes organising your products simple thanks to the beauty of drag-and-drop.

Another advantage is that you don't need any knowledge of HTML, and you can build a more responsive and intuitive interface than a web-based system. Actinic also understands that there's more to doing business online than simply taking and processing an order. You'll probably need to handle web, phone and mail orders, refunds, price corrections, order processing and back-ordering. Actinic can do all this. Plus it pre-empts the ultimate frustration - when people order products that turn out to be out of stock - by handling stock levels and stopping sales at pre-defined levels.

Nor is it limited when it comes to taking payments. Not only will it accept PayPal, Google Checkout and most of the major IPSPs, but also payment on delivery and invoice with order. Actinic wanted to allow its users to handle MOTO (Mail Order/Telephone Order) in a secure way that would comply with the new PCI DSS standards and so it built an Actinic Payments gateway which will be fully compliant. This costs £100 per annum.

This is just another example of the fully featured, well-rounded product that Actinic has become. And with this new version, the designs have been greatly improved with a more modern look.

Actinic isn't the cheapest way to do business as you'll also need to find somewhere to host your site, but its ability to interface with most payment systems and to handle the whole selling process, as well as sell downloadable products, makes it a serious contender.

Author: Mark Newton