Actinic Catalog is a complete ecommerce solution developed specifically for the small to medium business, incorporating everything you need to set up and run an ecommerce site.

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Actinic Business offers all the features of Actinic Catalog, with additional functionality designed for business to business transactions and advanced business to consumer features

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Actinic software offers all the features of a complete online catalogue with an easy to use interface and built-in security, at low cost and with no monthly charges.

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Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business each comprise two components:
An easy-to-use Windows programme that installs on your PC. This creates your commerce 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

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Windows XP (service pack 2) or Vista
1GB RAM (2GB for Vista)
Minimum 1 GHz processor recommended (2 GHz or faster for sites with over 5000 products)
Internet Explorer 6
120MB available hard disk space

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Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business are best suited to sites with between 1 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 VAT 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.

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Actinic Business 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 to publish it.

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Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business allow you to configure attributes and choices for each product in the online catalogue. For instance, you can have a t-shirt that is available in both a range of sizes and a range of colours. It is also possible to make each combination of choices a different price.

You can associate product choices with other products in the online catalogue. 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.

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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 colours to be used in the catalogue (e.g. background colour, font colour etc)
Images, such as navigation buttons and product images, which are used in the catalogue Layouts, which are used to create the layout of each part of the online catalogue

When you upload your catalogue, 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.

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Actinic Catalog, Actinic Business and Actinic Business Plus can be integrated with Virtual Card Services Secure Payment Gateway (who take credit card numbers securely and carry out the transactions online).

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Customers can visit and browse through the online catalogue. If a customer sees a product they wish to purchase then they click on the 'Add to Shopping Cart' button. The online catalogue 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 checkout.

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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 fulfil your orders.

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As with all good software, Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business can be customised, 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 colour schemes that can be combined and customised. This gives you access to literally thousands of different design looks at the click of a button.

Alternatively, we can design a custom site to match your requirements and budget. Please contact Actinic Sales for further details.

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Online catalogues cannot be exclusively maintained using Dreamweaver, or similar web design applications. However, because Actinic software creates static HTML pages, any part of your online catalogue can be easily linked to your existing site using normal hyperlinks. Actinic's extensive design options allow you to make sure that the look and feel of your online catalogue is fully integrated with the rest of your site.

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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.

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You will be automatically notified via email that you have an order waiting.
The orders can then be downloaded at the most convenient time for you.

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Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business 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 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.

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There are several reasons why we think this is a bad idea.

1. 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

2. Security: most email travels over the Internet in plain text and could be read by anyone

3. Convenience: Actinic's method of downloading orders means that you are in control of how and when orders are received and processed.

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With Actinic Business you can set up customer accounts that allow your regular customers to log into your online catalogue with a username and password. Your customers will be presented with a personalised online shopping experience which features their own prices, depending on what price schedule they belong to, and Actinic Business 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.

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Actinic Business 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 can allow you to create quantity-based discounts on each product line, allowing a lower unit price if a customer orders a higher quantity.

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Actinic's software differs from ecommerce solutions, which generate 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, whereas 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 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.

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