Actinic Business 5

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.

Author: Mark Newton