When Written: April 2009
PRICE:
| Product | Price (excl. VAT) |
| Actinic Express Setup | £49.99 |
| Actinic Express Monthly Fee | £19.99 |
INTERNET: www.actinic.com
SUPPLIER: 0845 129 4800 or sales@actinic.co.uk
VERDICT: Actinic Express is much improved over the first version and can make an easy entry into selling on-line.
Actinic Express 2 is the new version of Actinic’s on-line shop product. This competes head on with similar products offered by most major hosting ISPs or even on-line companies like EBay and Amazon ( for a full feature on setting up an on-line shop see issue xxxx ). Actinic as a company has a lot of experience in producing software that enables you to create and run an on-line shop, Express is their web-based fully hosted version. This product is their second version and is aimed to be an easy and low cost entry to running an internet shop.
Actinic Express is extremely easy to setup, with no real limitation to the number of products, and a simple wizard to follow to configure all the important but boring business details. However the design of your final web site is limited to one of twelve themes, although each of these can be customised as far as colours and text font and sizes so there is a degree of personalisation. This could be limiting for some companies but in reality for most people starting out it is an acceptable limitation. Actinic list some 184 improvements over version 1 of this product and performance has been improved, but we would have liked to have seen a more modern behaving site, no Web2 here, the pages are based on HTML forms with a submit button and whilst perfectly useable and easy to understand, the functionality is starting to look a little dated.
The system supports a variety of payment systems and payment providers including the very versatile ‘Actinic Payments’ system, support for others like SecPay (now PayPoint) is limited and does not support their now compulsory extra security measures, so you need to check with your Internet Payment Provider before you commit, support for PayPal and Google checkout is included so getting setup to take payments can be very simple. The other area we were hoping to be added was the ability to handle stock, there is no capability in this product, which whilst was acceptable in version one, we would have thought it might make version two as its competing products offer this.
Overall Actinic Express 2 is much improved from the previous version and stands up well against the completion. It is easy to setup and run, with full order processing, the monthly costs are reasonable, if you are prepared to work around the few limitations then it might be just the product to get you selling on the internet.
EASE OF USE: 6
FEATURES: 4
VALUE FOR MONEY: 4
OVERALL: 5
System Requirements
| Any Web BrowserInternet connection |
A simple easy to follow Administration area.
A full order processing module is included
Themes enable you to change the look of your web site but can be limited
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton