Actinic Ecommerce software
We use Actinic software. We made this choice for several reasons:
- Actinic is the UK market leader. That means that in addition to support from Actinic there is also a large user-base many of whom share their experience through on-line forums.
- It is a mature product and feature packed - consequently it addresses a wide range of different customer requirements, you won't need them all but if, for example, at a later date you want to start offering discounts to selected customers, the facility is there.
- It works with a wide range of secure payment mechanisms.
- There are some potentially useful third party add-ons available.
- The support Actinic provide can sometimes prove too technical in nature for some users and is primarily concerned with resolving technical issues with the product rather than teaching you how to use the product. Web Technik aim to offer an additional more hands-on practical level of support, we aim to support the current and most recent prior version.
- In the past we have investigated a raft of alternative products. We have even used a few of the better ones but ultimately we found Actinic best fulfilled our needs and those of our clients and it is now our preferred Ecommerce offering.
- With Actinic YOU hold a complete copy of your website on YOUR office PC. If the server were to become unavailable you could simply upload the site elsewhere. (You must ensure you keep backup copies too in case your PC has a problem, Actinic includes a backup module and will prompt you to take backups.)
- We recommend that you take a support contract with Actinic and keep up to date with new versions.
- Actinic is the most widely used ecommerce tool amongst professional web-designers.
Payment methods
This can be a tricky area for start-up businesses. The Banks have largely failed to grasp the fact that they need to make it easy for web retailers to process credit card payments securely. If you have a fairly small product set we can use the PayPal payment functionality.
PayPal fees are comparatively high but it's easy to get started and it's a widely recognised payment mechanism so represents a good starting point. If sales go well future you should switch to an alternative with lower running costs. That might be through a service offered by your Bank or through an intermediary. We can advise you and Actinic can operate with all the leading payment options.