E-commerce websites
One of our customers came to us with a problem. His Actinic based on-line shop web site was generating so much additional business his staff were struggling to pack and post all the orders. We can't promise to give you the same problem! Nor can we promise to help you the way we were able to help him - it just so happened we knew someone with the right kind of experience who was looking for a job!
In all honesty, for an on-line shop to be a success requires a combination of factors:
- Your time and commitment to make it a success
- A product set suited to Internet sales i.e:
- products people may have difficulty finding elsewhere
- a buyer doesn't need to see and touch before purchase
- low risk of legal issues (for example selling alcohol or tobacco: how do you avoid under-age users buying?)
- that can be delivered quickly, safely and without disproportionate expense
- Remember that perishable, fragile or heavy items require special consideration in respect of shipping
- Not a product for which the on-line market is already over-supplied unless you have a spectacular USP (unique selling proposition)
- Not solely reliant on the website - supplemented by other marketing efforts or possibly a physical shop. If the online shop is designed to supplement an existing business rather than to become your sole route to market the other factors reduce in importance.
Ecommerce software
Our preferred product for building Ecommerce web sites is Actinic, however it isn't the best solution in all cases.
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 that in most cases Actinic best fulfilled our needs and those of our clients and it is now our sole Ecommerce offering.
Some alternatives are entirely web-based with the "shop" effectively being dependent on a third party. We were approached by a retailer asking for help when such a provider had ceased trading, taking off-line hundreds of hours' effort inputting product images, descriptions etc. There was no way to recover any of it, all the customer had on his PC was a folder of product images. 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.)
The main barrier to using Actinic is the cost. Whereas the product itself is only a few hundred pounds (depending on the feature set you need) a lot of work and expertise is needed to set it up to work with your products and in the way you need. It is possible for an end-user to buy Actinic and build their own on-line shop but you must make allowance for the possibly hundreds of hours work it may take to do that - time you might better spend on your core business rather than learning the intricacies of the product.
There are even "free" ecommerce products but all that saves is the initial purchase price, the real cost is the effort involved in building your on-line catalogue.
Neverthless we do recognise that Actinic isn't the best solution in all cases. Read more about the alternatives here.
Some recent Actinic ecommerce sites by Web Technik.
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