Actinic Catalog Shopping Cart Software

The Anything Left-Handed web site uses Actinic Catalog for all product information, shopping basket and checkout functions. We have used it for more than 4 years and recommend it very highly. We are grateful to Actinic for their software and support and happy to promote them.

Go to the Anything Left-Handed site home page
Go to the Anything Left-Handed site shop index page (produced by Actinic)

Actinic have a range of products for businesses of all sizes, the main distinctions being

Actinic Express - their web based system for fast start-up

Actinic Business software you run from your own computers and host yourself

Get a free trial download of the Actinic software and see for yourself
You just give your details and get a fully functioning version of the software for 30 days. You can build your catalog and test it, then when you buy the software, just enter your key on the trial version and you are off!

Scroll down to see our thoughts on the strengths and benefits of using Actinic Catalog and some useful links

Automating Actinic

We have used One Stop Automation and One Stop Order Processing from Mole End Software to do the following: Download orders automatically at 7.00 each morning Clean customer addresses and other formatting tasks Print order paperwork Send personalised emails to confirm despatch of orders Follow up incomplete payments from template emails Various other order handling and formatting functions This additional functionality saves us a huge amount of time and give a far better service to our customers - highly recommended and very good value

We used this software to produce our original site in 1999 and upgraded to produce our second-generation site in-house in 2001. By 2003 our business had grown a lot and the web was our main development focus so we tried a "more professional" route using a third-party specialist design and development company with a budget of over £30,000 to develop an e-commerce site using expensive, heavyweight tools like Commerce Server 2003.

It was supposed to be a 3 month project, but after 9 months and a lot of heartache we decided we could not take the problems and poor site performance any longer and parted company with the development company (!).

At that stage we purchased Actinic Developer Version 7 and built the site we wanted ourselves - and that is what you see here now. The total spend including all software and a little bit consultancy advice from Actinic was well under £3,000 and we think we now have a better site than we ever would have had from the outside development.

You can see a profile of our business produced by Actinic on their website by selecting from their top menu - Examples | Case Studies.

Strengths of the Actinic Catalog software

• It is easy to set up and use straight out of the box using the standard templates
• It can also be heavily customised and integrate with other software and pages if you want your own style
• It is a simple visual product that can be used by people without development expertise
• Untrained staff can add and amend products and process orders
• It is easy to integrate with online Payment Service Providers for clearing credit cards
• There is a huge user community and support network to help with almost anything
• There is loads of low-priced third-party software available that can be added for more functionality
• It is excellent value, very robust and undergoing constant further development

Actinic resources

Links to the following are available from the Actinic introduction page (top menu bar)

• The Actinic Knowledge Base has loads of information about all aspects of the software
• The Actinic Community Forum is full of very clever people and extremely useful
• Product information, feature comparisons, manuals, guides and more at the download centre

Benefits of Actinic Catalog for marketing your online shop

• You have complete control over all product and page content
• The software produces "flat" html pages that are ideal for indexing in search engines
• It also produces and automatic Site Map page that indexes every page on the site for easy spidering
• You control all page names, titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords
• Using the templates you can specify content globally or a section, sub-section or products level
• We chose to produce an individual page for each product so we can get all of the items indexed in search engines individually

Advantages of using Actinic over an outside development

• You are in control and can do what you like
• You own the software and everything on your site and have it on your own computers so you are completely independent of the company (with our outside development project, I could not sleep at night worrying about whether the company would still be in business the next day - if they were not, neither were we as all our site and the software to run it was on THEIR servers and we had NOTHING)
• You will save an absolute fortune
• When you want to change something, you can just do it yourself for nothing rather than having to wait ages for someone else to specify it, approve it and work out how much to charge you for it.
• If you want to integrate cheap third-party software for additional functionality or marketing, you can just do it (if you have an outside developer, they would rather charge you a lot of money for developing things themselves than use the many cheap and perfectly good tools that are available
• There are lots of Actinic developers who can help you if you need it - you will have to pay them but YOU still end up owning all the software and site materials and are still in control

Get a free trial download of the Actinic software and see for yourself

Actinic links

Powered by Actinic shopping cart software

Powered by Actinic Express asp online shopping cart software