Forum Moderators: buckworks
1) Does the Actinic Catalog bit allow you to build a site for a client and then allow them to update the products, prices, etc. themselves? How easy do clients in general find this?
2) With developer edition is that a one-off fee? Say I built 10 E-Comm sites for 10 diff. clients who all wanted to update the products themselves does it allow me to do this or do they sting you for mutiple licenses for the Catalog component?
Have you registered to download a free 30 day trial? All the terms and conditions are likely to be in the trial version, so this may answer your questions.
Is there any e-commerce package you rececommend?
I decided to build my own using mysql/php and tieing it in to mals e-comm, and its free.
Have you looked at OS-commerce?
I have looked at quite a few sites using Actnic and didn't like any of them, but thats my personal opinion :)
Karl
I think what I'm starting to realise is that it's all about personal preference. I suppose the thing that I like about Actinic is that is creates static HTML pages which are good for SEO but this might be the feature that puts a lot of other people off who are more into database driven sites.
i spent quite a while going through the actinic software, wanting to install it for a client of ours.
although they had good customer support, i found the shop software to be not as flexible as we needed.
we have since installed another shop software - ab-shop.com - which specifically was able to work with spanish payment providers.
but in retrospect i wish we had started from scratch with our own system. php and mysql would have been a good choice.
i tend to think these shop software systems are perfect for clients themselves, who have no idea about html, to get a shop up online within a few days. but for a webdevelopper they don't offer nearly enough flexibility and customization options.
i would recommend developping a basic shop, which you can then customize according to the needs of each client. that way you control the indexibility of the shop by SEs, you control the navigation, you can even give a mini 'back office' so that clients themselves can change stuff like prices, products, descriptions, etc.
and making static pages in php is no problem - simply go to the php/perl forum on this site.
good luck
p.s. just wanted to add that i am no expert with programming, but (as i am finding out at the moment) a combi like php/mysql really is 'relatively' easy to learn ;-)
For instance, I've seen on some sites, there would be a list of items with a quantity box next to it, and in some circumstances a check-box that they would click to order that item. Then there would be one 'add-to-cart' button on the bottom of the page.
Can OSCommerce do this, or if not, anyone know of a good software package that can?
Jaeden
:)
You can build and deploy as many sites as you please for free from Actinic Developer. The client can do NOTHING without purchasing some Actinic package or other (including taking orders directly. There is an orders only module available). I personally consider this to be one of Actinics strengths.
If they do purchase Actinic, then they can make changes themselves, but take a tip, and get it reading from a database, so they are updating in their existing accounts / stock control system, rather than Actinic. This cuts out duplication of effort, and makes it rather more likely that the data will be good
>> 2) With developer edition is that a one-off fee? Say I built 10 E-Comm sites for 10 diff. clients who all wanted to update the products themselves does it allow me to do this or do they sting you for mutiple licenses for the Catalog component?
Well technically, the clients get stung, because they buy Catalog / whatever, not you.
>> but for a webdevelopper they don't offer nearly enough flexibility and customization options.
Umm. Actinic Developer lets you mod just about everything, the .mdb and the Perl scripts. Its as customisable as your technical skills. We even rewrote the database query routine because building a 50 line order from a 10000 product database took about 2 minutes. After the mod, it took about 4 seconds (there were issues in the order query processes were being carried out in, simple database query optimisation stuff really).
Also, we found a bug in our very first go with it, and the Actinic dev team were very nice, gave us a patch and everything
They have developer edition with multi store features.
Thanks for the advice. You answered my question exactly. We can use Developer to build multiple sites and any of those where the clients needs to update the product catalogue themseleves we can sell them a copy of Catalog and give them a bit of training.
As a tip you said to get Actinic reading from their existing stock / accounts software. How easy is this? What can it integrate with? One client in particular doesn't use a well recognised package like Sage or Quickbooks but uses a custom-built mail-order software package that is built on a Access DB. Could Actinic suck the product data out of that?
One other thing - how easy is it to train a client to use Catalog to update their product catalogue? 1/2 or 1 day?
Erol looks good until you realise it's frames based. I don't do frames. I don't care what anyone says, they are not the best for SEO. Other than that, it's looks a decent product.
As a tip you said to get Actinic reading from their existing stock / accounts software. How easy is this?
What can it integrate with? One client in particular doesn't use a well recognised package like Sage or Quickbooks but uses a custom-built mail-order software package that is built on a Access DB. Could Actinic suck the product data out of that?
At the moment actinic only works with sage and quickbooks
but the main database is access based and i am sure it can be customised quite easily.
One other thing - how easy is it to train a client to use Catalog to update their product catalogue? 1/2 or 1 day?
Depending on your clients knowledge of computers i would say normally a day to possibly 2 days as actinic has its own inbuilt ftp and everything is more or less done for you as soon as the upload button is pressed.
Bek
>> At the moment actinic only works with sage and quickbooks
Thats native, no-brainer integratiopn. If you have a grasp on the data structure of ANY fairly open accounts system, you can integrate as closely as your skills will allow. If you don't, hire someone who does
>> One other thing - how easy is it to train a client to use Catalog to update their product catalogue? 1/2 or 1 day?
Depends a lot on your client... The whole point about doing the tight integration stuff (from our point of view) was to get the client doing updates in a system they are already familiar with (and that we don't have to support ;)) which, in theory, reduces the problems enormously
furman : I've spent some time looking at EROL, and yes it have some great features, but its still a frames based JavaScript cart. A much better implementation of the beast, and they were receptive to the idea of making it SEO friendly last time I spoke to them. I guess that if you use a static HTML site as the "pull" for traffic, and then pass to the cart, it should work well, but you aren't likely to get many hits direct to product level pages
You come across as you like Actinic. Is that all you use? Or have you used others and preferred that? I'm weighing them up at present and the only other one in the frame is StoreFront. Any experience?
Not really. It's one of about 3 or 4 packages we use. It has it's plus points, and its problems. We just pick the one that works for the project
>> the only other one in the frame is StoreFront. Any experience?
'Fraid not
