Q: What is Actinic?
A: Actinic is a desk top solution for building your online ecommerce store?
Q: What makes Actinic products so special?
A: Actinic software offers all the features of a complete online catalog with an easy to use interface and built-in security, at low cost and, this is the best part, NO monthly charges.
Q: How does Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business work?
A: Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business each comprise two components:
- An easy-to-use windows program that installs on your pc. This creates your ecommerce site and downloads and processes your orders.
- A set of scripts which are automatically installed at your web site and provide the features of an electronic shopping cart and ordering system.
Q: What do i need to use Actinic ecommerce shopping cart?
A: Actinic catalog requires:
- A pentium pc.
- Windows 95, 98, 2000 or nt 4.0.
- Minimum 32mb of ram.
- Minimum 60mb of free disk space.
- Internet access.
At the web site, Actinic catalog requires a standard commercial web package including:
- At least 5mb of web space (depending on the size of the catalog).
- Cgi-bin with perl 5 or later.
- Ftp access to the cgi-bin.
Check out our services pages for listings of suitable hosts.
Q: How do I get my product information into my online catalog?
A: Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business ecommerce shopping cart are best suited to sites with between 10 and 20,000 product lines. These can be arranged in sections and sub-sections, with an unlimited number of levels.
- If you already have a list of products in electronic format, this data can be easily imported via the import wizard. Alternatively, you can manually enter the information via the windows user interface.
- Entering product information is simple. All that is required is to enter a part number and name, a description, price and tax treatment. You can also link an image file with the product, and even put a hyperlink in the product description to a page of more in-depth information.
Q: Can I link dynamically to an external database or spreadsheet?
A: Actinic business ecommerce shopping cart offers dynamic linking to an external data source as a third option. This allows you to build your product range in any application and pull your data into Actinic business ecommerce shopping cart to publish it.
Q: How can I offer a range of choices with each product?
A: Actinic catalog and Actinic business ecommerce shopping cart allows you to configure attributes and choices for each product in the online catalog. For instance, you can have a t-shirt that is available in both a range of sizes and a range of colors. It is also possible to make each combination of choices a different price.
You can associate product choices with other products in the online catalog. For example, a customer can assemble a PC online by selecting from a variety of available components such as memory, monitors and hard disk space.
Q: How is my online catalog generated?
A: Actinic software generates your commerce site as a set of normal html pages. The pages are created from three components:
- Information provided by the vendor about names, description and prices of products together with information on terms and conditions in the company. The vendor also provides information about the colors to be used in the catalog (eg: background color, font color etc)
- Images, such as navigation buttons and product images, which are used in the catalog.
- Templates which are used to create the layout of each part of the online catalog.
When you upload your catalog, the complete html pages are generated on the desktop according to the specifications of the above three groups of components. These are then automatically sent to the web site. Once complete, your commerce site is open for business.
Q: Is Actinic software secure?
A: Yes. Actinic catalog and Actinic business both use 128-bit encryption to safely encrypt credit card information. This means that only the purchaser and vendor can read customers' credit card information. The vendor can process the credit card numbers in the normal way.
Alternatively, Actinic catalog and Actinic business can be integrated with a secure server (ssl) or a number of payment service providers (who take credit card numbers securely and carry out the transactions online).
These include
- QuickBooks Merchant Services
- Paypal
- Authorize.net
- Worldpay
Q: How do customers place orders at the web site?
A: Customers can visit and browse through the online catalog. If a customer sees a product they wish to purchase then they click on the 'add to shopping cart' button. The online catalog then registers which product this customer has selected and the customer is shown an electronic 'shopping cart' that contains their product. This shopping cart is carried with them while they are visiting the site and it goes with them into the secure checkout.
Q: How do I manage stock inventory levels?
A: Actinic's stock monitoring feature allows you to monitor each product line individually, warning you as product levels run low and automatically suspending online ordering when necessary. You are able to print off reports detailing stock levels to help you with re-ordering stock items in plenty of time to fulfill your orders. Alternately you can manage your stock levels with QuickBooks using the built in
QuickBooks Link in Actinic!
Q: How can I change the appearance of Actinic catalog?
A: As with all good software, Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business ecommerce shopping cart can be customized, providing a look and feel that meets your company's requirements and style sheets. The product is shipped with dozens of pre-designed themes and color schemes that can be combined and customized. This give you access to literally thousands of different design looks at the click of a button. In addition you can import many of the
Professionally Built Templates that incorporate advanced Actinic features into the web design.
When your catalog is ready to be transferred to your web site, it is generated as a series of 'html template' files. These files are installed in the 'site 1' (or equivalent) directory and can be accessed by viewing the 'template manager'. By changing these files you can change the appearance of your catalog and make it look just as you wish, while still enabling you to add, change or delete product and other details through the Actinic application.
Alternatively, many professional web designers can design a custom site to match your requirements and budget. Please contact Actinic or look on our web site for further details.
Q: Can I integrate my online catalog with my existing website?
A: Online catalog cannot be exclusively maintained using Microsoft FrontPage, or similar web design applications outside of the Actinic User Interface. However, because Actinic software creates static html pages, any part of your online catalog can be easily linked to your FrontPage site using normal hyperlinks. Actinic's extensive design options allow you to make sure that the look and feel of your online catalog is fully integrated with the rest of your site.
Q: How can I change all the text in my site?
A: Using display options, you have the ability to change every bit of text in the website. This is useful if you wish to change the site to another language. Use the search facility in the dialogue to locate the precise piece of text you want to edit.
Q: How will I know if an order is waiting at my website.
A: You will be automatically notified via email that you have an order waiting. The orders can then be downloaded by Actinic software at the most convenient time for you.
Q: How can I make sure my customers are charged the right amount for shipping and tax?
A: Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business ecommerce shopping cart have sophisticated shipping and tax calculation systems built into the program. You can set up shipping zones and classes to ensure that your customers will only be offered the most appropriate shipping methods for them. There is also a location based tax calculator that allows you to configure multiple tax rates and bands. This ensures that your customers will be charged correctly.
Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business ecommerce shopping cart will allow you to display tax inclusive prices, tax exclusive prices or both. You also have the option of choosing a second currency for displaying prices at your site.
Q: Can I integrate Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business ecommerce shopping cart with any of my accounting packages?
A: Actinic link provides direct integration between Quickbooks and Sage Line 50 accounting packages.
Alternatively, using Actinic's “Export” facility, information about contacts, products ordered, product details etc can be exported as a delimited text file and imported into other applications.
Actinic software uses an access-style database to store information, which can be manually edited using Microsoft access. However, it is recommended that you do not adjust or integrate with this file directly as it can cause problems with your Actinic application.
Q: Why not just email the orders straight to me?
A: There are several reasons why we think this is a bad idea.
- Reliability: You will need access to a mail server in order to receive orders, and then if the server goes down for any reason, you will lose all record of the order.
- Security: Most email travels over the internet in plain text and could be read by anyone.
- Convenience: Actinic's method of downloading orders means that you are in control of how and when orders are received and processed.
Q: How can I support multiple currencies on my Actinic site?
A: Although Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business ecommerce shopping cart can use any two currencies in an online catalog, there are a number options available to have multi-currency support on your site.
By using Worldpay as an online credit card processing service, a currency converter is provided at the point when people are transferred to the Worldpay server to make their payments.
There are several online currency converters that can be linked to at any point in your online catalog. Just do a search for 'currency converters' on a search engine and you will be presented with a range to choose from.
Some (such as www.Xe.Com) will provide you with the code you need to integrate their currency converter into your site.
Q: Which shopping portals can I add my Actinic products to for increased traffic and promotion?
A: The following shopping portals will accept feeds built using Actinic ecommerce shopping cart software, subject to your compliance with their additional requirements. Simply go to their website and submit your shop.
- Froogle.com
- Pricegraber.com
- Shopping.com
- SortPrice.com
- YahooShopping
Q: How can I set up customer accounts in Actinic Business?
A: With Actinic Business ecommerce shopping cart you can set up customer accounts that allow your regular customers to log into your online catalog with a username and password. Your customers will be presented with a personalized online shopping experience which features their own prices, depending on what price schedule they belong to, and Actinic Business ecommerce shopping cart will also remember their name and address information. When setting up a customer account you can specify a range of address information, create credit limits for different buyers and choose whether you want the account administrator to be informed via email of every purchase made by their buyers on the site.
Q: How does Actinic ecommerce shopping cart handle different pricing structures?
A: Actinic Business Version 8 allows you to set up a range of price schedules and then choose which customer accounts you wish to belong to which price schedules. Also, Actinic Business Version 8 can allow you to create quantity-based discounts on each product line, allowing a lower unit price if a customer orders a higher quantity.
Q: Will my Actinic ecommerce shopping cart site be search engine friendly?
A: Actinic's software differs from ecommerce solutions which generate dynamic web pages on the fly from an underlying database. Actinic's strategy is to generate the entire shop site on the merchant's pc, and then upload it to the web server in the form of static html pages. In this way all the text on every page in the site, including product names and descriptions, is made visible to the search engines.
What this means is that a web search for, say, Reebok trainers, will find an Actinic site which is selling them, where as a site based on a dynamic database is unlikely to show up.
Unique meta tag descriptions and keywords can be easily entered for every page on the site, making it easy to produce a search engine friendly site without without the risk of accidental spamming.
Addition of home page links on every page, the inclusion of contact information, and support for alt tags for images are other features which are liked by search engines and directories. Good ecommerce software such as Actinic provides support for them all.
