Actinic Express

Since the price is so low, and there’s no limit to the number of products you can sell, it may well appeal to some larger ones too.

You can choose whether or not you require customers to create an account, if you want them to confirm acceptance of your T&Cs, and the obligatory ‘can we share your email’ opt-in. Processing orders is a matter of signing in to the site where you’ll see how many are pending. You can then view details, mark them as paid, despatched or delete them.

There are also tools to manage customers, including the ability to select by postcode. However, there’s no option to download the details, which will be a pain should you wish to create a promotional email or use third-party tools to analyse how customers use your site.

There are some other niggles. Your store is built from templates and, at the moment there’s only a fairly limited range; though you can change the colour scheme.

And while there’s an upgrade path to Catalog, and the ability to export your product list in Excel or Catalog formats, as yet there’s no facility to batch-import.

On the positive side, you can register a domain for £9.99 ex VAT (.com domains for one year, all others for two years) for your shop when you set it up, or configure your own DNS so that the store appears within an existing domain, e.g. shop.nigelwhitfield.com.

Actinic also says it can arrange a customised site design for a fee, if you want a completely different look.

Despite a few minor irritations, Actinic Express is a straightforward way to get a shop online. It compares well with similar offerings from competitors such as 1&1 and, for many, having a clear upgrade path will provide extra peace of mind.

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