Review: Actinic Express

Smaller businesses looking to set up an online store face the daunting prospect of getting the site built and looking good, setting up the inventory and putting a secure customer registration and payment processing system in place. Fortunately there are several products around to help out on this, including Actinic Express.

Actinic provides a service for companies that just have products to sell and don't want the hassle of setting up and maintaining an online store. The firm offers secure hosting facilities, and optional payment processing.

Actinic Express costs £49.99 plus a monthly subscription fee of £19.99. Although it isn't the cheapest around, the package is still very reasonable and offers a wide range of options and services. It is expensive compared to alternatives such as Mr Site, but you do get quite a lot for your money.

The entire package is managed through an online portal, so there is no software to install and your site can be managed from anywhere, although you'll want to make sure that any PC you use is secure or you risk allowing someone else to access your customers and their payment details, a sure fire way to find yourself without customers very quickly.

Actinic will provide a web address, but it will include 'actinicexpress.com' in the URL. There is the option to associate your site with another web address, so you may want to register a more appropriate name.

Setting up a new site takes a lot of time and effort, but Actinic has tried to make the process as easy as possible by hiding all the technical stuff. There are a lot of customisation options available, from designing the site to uploading product information, images and business details, including company information, terms and conditions, tax settings, shipping methods and payment options.

The site designer is template-based, but with a lot of flexibility. There are a dozen basic themes but, when combined with the various colours, images and other layout options, it's not too difficult to create a fairly unique looking site. All the designs are slick and good looking, leaving the options down to personal preference and what suits the type of products on sale.

There is no way to preview changes made to the site, but edits propagate very quickly making it easy to see how any alterations will appear.

Probably the biggest task will be loading the site with inventory. There is no way of importing a list of products, so each one will have to be generated manually. As you might expect, there is also the option of creating sections for various product categories, but there is no way to have a product spanning multiple categories without creating multiple copies of it.

One thing Actinic Express doesn't do is inventory control, so you'll have to handle that yourself. If something is out of stock there is an option to temporarily remove products from the site, rather than deleting them entirely or having to email customers who order it to tell them the item is out of stock.

Customer account creation is optional as is the ability to allow customers to purchase items without registering. Site owners with registered customers have the option of managing their details or exporting information to Excel, usually for marketing purposes.

Actinic Express sites can work with or without JavaScript and cookies, but will lack some functionality if these settings are disabled by visitors.

When it comes to payment, Actinic integrates with a wide variety of the most well-known payment providers, including its own Actinic Payments, Google Checkout, PayPal, Protx and Secpay. But it doesn't create these accounts for you, so you'll have to create them yourself if you want to use them.

Furthermore, the monthly subscription fee doesn't include payment processing. This can be handled through Actinic Payments for an extra £20 set-up cost and annual fee of £100 for up to 800 transactions per year and 39p per transaction thereafter.

This is somewhat on the expensive side, but all the other providers will cost money, so it's more a case of striking the right balance of payment options for customers versus the cost of each service.

Actinic Express can also email customers and the site owner regarding all stages of a sale from ordering, payment and shipping.

For larger organisations there is the option of Actinic Catalog at £399 and Actinic Business at £799. If your company grows large enough, there are ways to migrate to these options without having to start from scratch.

Actinic claims that the packages also include automated search engine optimisation to make sure that sites are ranked favourably, and there is also direct integration with Google Analytics to help track traffic trends.

It's worth noting here that there are no advanced options that allow you to edit any of the site's code yourself, meaning that it's not possible to do things like embed video clips, create forms for reader comments or reviews, or any other features not offered by Actinic. Similarly, aside from being able to export the customer details to an Excel spreadsheet, there are no marketing features available.

Ultimately, for those who just want to sell stuff online and would rather someone else handled all the web design, hosting and the complicated process of payment and customer account management, Actinic can provide all the basics through a simple easy to use interface.

However, those who want to offer more advanced features may want to look at the alternatives.