Review: Actinic Business 8 ecommerce software

Now some 10 years old, Actinic is a mature and comprehensive ecommerce application that not only lets you design and build an online store, but also process orders, accept payment and run the store on a day-to-day basis.

The development work is all done on a standard Windows PC, with the results uploaded as a collection of Perl scripts to be hosted on a web server of your choice.

We tried the latest Actinic Business 8 package, launched in August, which builds on the simpler Actinic Catalog (£379 ex VAT).

The new version adds support for advanced trading options such as discount coupons and group pricing, plus links to Sage and Quickbooks accounting packages and external product databases.

This package lets you create and run only one site, but a multisite version is also available (£1,249 ex VAT), along with new implementations for developers looking to develop branded sites for customers.

Ecommerce sites tend to have a lot in common and, like other packages, the Actinic software starts up with a sample site, which you modify to suit your needs.

This is straightforward with a preview window showing what the site will look like.

The content structure is displayed alongside in expandable tree format.

Item details are shown in a third pane, with a new point-and-click interface for Actinic 8, making it even easier to add, edit and organise store contents.

We quickly got used to the way this format worked and were able to create new store sections of our own, then populate them with custom products, specify the pricing, shipping details, and so on.

We could also change the look and feel of the site by choosing from an extensive list of themes provided.

A new design tab lets you change the underlying code by clicking on what you want to modify in the preview window.

Also new in this release is the ability to customise site design using Dreamweaver.

Behind each Actinic site is a complete order processing system with support for a range of payment-handling services, enabling even the smallest of businesses to offer a range of secure online payment methods.

Stock control and invoicing options are also built in, with barcode support one of the many new options in Actinic 8, along with one-click order completion, where you specify in advance how orders are to be fulfilled and billed.

Several marketing options have also been added.

Best-seller and new product lists can be generated and displayed on the site automatically and you can now link products for cross-promotion.

It’s possible to create ‘also bought’ lists based on previous customer choices and generate mailing lists, labels and envelopes for use in promotional activities.

Inevitably there are one or two features you might want in an ecommerce application that Actinic Business doesn’t offer.

Automatic picture sizing would make life easier and, although you can pull in product information from an external database when building a site, there’s no facility to link the finished store to a dynamic data source.

Although customers can indicate a desire to register for a site login, their details must be entered offline.

However these are relatively minor niggles and the package as a whole is well balanced.

The useful set of new features in Actinic 8 will make this small-business ecommerce package even more popular.