Time for a change....

I've had a e-commerce enabled site for a year now and it's time for change.

[chrisholgate]

Hi all,
I've had a site online now for just over a year but the current software is becoming slightly limited and I'm having difficulty finding a suitable alternative.

The original site was put together by my Web designer using a system called Mals E-commerce but he has now gone off to Uni so I’m having to do everything myself which is proving to be a steep learning curve to say the least.

To give you a bit of background, the beauty of Mals was that you could create a full HTML site in Dreamweaver and then literally paste 'add to cart' buttons on the site which would then link to their servers. They kept track of the shopping cart, transferred the user to a secure server when it was time to pay and then the order was downloaded into a piece of software on our server. I wish I could post you a URL so you could see what I currently have but unfortunately I can't although if you sticky me then I will of course forward it.

Anyway, the main limitations I'm finding with the current system is fairly poor integration with my PSP and Protx. In addition the occasional order is being 'lost' in the system, the order manager is fairly limited and there is no ability to create backorders.

I've been tinkering around with Actinic but the majority of Actinic sites look the same and I seem to be struggling to buck that trend. The software seems to want to dictate exactly how your site should look and how your site should operate but perhaps I haven’t got far enough through the 250 page manual to know different.

I was wondering if anyone could either post or sticky me the names of some of the higher rated E-commerce solutions for me to have a look at. My budget for this is fairly flexible but I would suggest keeping the cost of any recommendations under £1000 if possible. Perhaps there is one that you're currently using and have got along well with?

Webmaster world has been invaluable over the past year and as usual any help or advice you could give would be most appreciated.

Chris

[chrisholgate]

Suppose I should have mentioned that I would like to have an order management program if possible as present in Mals and Actinic that can be used to print off packing slips, search orders, export data etc.

Thanks again

[Symbios]

Actinic isn't that bad for that, I used it before we built our own cart and CMS, also if you mod the template files you can make the site look completely unique.

The only thind I disliked about Actinic was that it wasn't possible to play around with the orders and produce customised packing notes but it is possible to export text files and then import them into access where they can be manipulated.

[webtress]

Chris, take a look at [ecommercetemplates.com...] it offers printable packing slip via the admin you can demo the admin on their site I can let you know about the payment provider you mentioned I know I saw someone using it.

Chris I just sent you a sticky with the info for Protx. I may have sent it twice in error.

[derekwong28]

We too have been using Mal's and eventually found it too cumbersome. We have now switched to litecommerce. The great thing about litecommerce is that you can keep all your existing pages and simply replace the hyperlinks to Mal's with hyperlinks to the Litecommerce cart. We are now running 4 sites out of one database without any problems