Actinic Express

Actinic’s Catalog ecommerce software has long been a popular choice. It’s easy to set up and fairly simple to manage, but at around £400 it’s also a bit pricey to take a punt on if you’re starting up in business.

Step forward Actinic Express, an online shopping solution that includes an ecommerce system and the necessary web hosting for only £19.99 per month, plus VAT.

Unlike Catalog, which runs the management side of things on your PC, Actinic Express is a completely online service.

You sign-in to the website to view orders that have been placed, print them out, mark them as paid and so on. You also create your store by filling in the details of products online, adding photographs and purchase options.

Setting your store up is pretty straightforward thanks to a Wizard approach and plenty of standard text for Terms and Conditions and the like to save you having to work from scratch.

It’s good to see terms in there to help protect you should you make a mistake entering the price of an item - for customers there’s a reminder of their rights under the Distance Selling Directive.

There’s a good range of choices, so you can cater for products that might need customisation or come in different sizes and colours, and options can be copied from one product to another, saving time. You can even price in two currencies, though not with real-time rate conversion.

For payments, Worldpay, Protx, Paypal and Secpay are supported, which should be enough for the smaller businesses Express is aimed at.