Actinic Catalog 4

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.