I am looking for a cheap e-commerce package

I have a client with 50 to 100 product lines

[TerryW]

Any help in finding a small e-commerce package for a client who has 50 to 100 products to sell, and collect payment.
Any clues or suggestions would be most welcome.

Thanks from the UK

Terry

[martinibuster]

I read about a product (in PC Magazine or maybe ZDNet Smart Business)named Actinic. Like for 500 dollars a business bought their catalog software and had a business online selling 100k worth of ski supplies per year.

I haven't tried it. There is a downloadable demo, though.

[TallTroll]

Actinic is the most popular e-comm package in the UK market. It comes in 2 main flavours, Catalog (B2C) and Business (B2B). There is also a very handy Developers edition that lets you get right under the bonnet and play with the underlying .mdb and .pl files.

Current UK pricing is £250 for Catalog, and £850 for Business (hosting may or may not be included, depending on who you buy it from. Our own experience indicates that you either need to get hosting from an established Actinic reseller, or find a friendly host who will let you play with a brand new dedicated server, and have your wicked way with it. Thats what we did :)). Despite what it says on the resellers sites, I think you really do need a server set up specifically to handle Actinic properly.

The new v5 is really quite good, a vast improvement over v4 (so we are told; never really got into 4). It is letting us do all the complex multi-tiered pricing structure stuff "out-of-site", then bring it back into Actinic for the actual basket processes. Order export as a CSV file, and then plug that into the backend accounts system, done job.

Like most e-comm systems, you need to have (or buy in) some fairly good technical skills to get the best out of it, but it is quite flexible.

[4eyes]

Actinic is nice 'cos the pages it produces are html and can be made to be search engine friendly.

Watch out for the Perl requirements though - as I recall it needs a fairly recent version to be installed on your server.

[TallTroll]

The folder permissions are a bit tricksy too. Thats part of why it took us a couple of days to get the clean server set up right (and getting all the right Perl modules installed). We are fiddling with it a bit though

[Marcia]

TerryW, you caught my eye with the word "cheap" because that's quite often how I have to operate, since I do a certain number of Mom 'n Pop sites and those are generally on a tight startup budget.

You can also check Mal's Ecommerce (he's in the UK). There's a link to a shopping cart program on his site that interfaces with his site for secure ordering - it's free for the basic cart, and the "deluxe" is under $100 if I remember correctly. It's only usable for his service (which is free), but depending on how cheap your client wants it, it may do, at least for starters.

[Crazy_Fool]

terry
don't start off by thinking "cheap" - cheap is not always best.

start by thinking about requirements and look at what's available. then look at prices and terms. spending a bit more now to get the most suitable system can save you a lot of time, effort and money in the medium and long term. setting up on the cheap may save you money in the short term, but it can also cost you in lost sales.

if can you give a bit more info about the products, your web skills (CGI / ASP / PHP etc) and so on, then we should be able to give you some more recommendations.