Actinic Announces New Ecommerce Software for Online Retailers

• Wednesday, 05 July 2006

FAO: NewsDesk - Version 8 introduces new ‘point and click’ design & many new marketing features -

Product images available from www.actinic.co.uk/press/products.htm

West Byfleet, Surrey – 5 July 2006 - Actinic, the UK’s best-selling supplier of ecommerce solutions for small and medium businesses, announces the release of version 8 of its desktop ecommerce range. With a new object-based architecture, Actinic v8 offers online merchants a significant upgrade in functionality and a host of new features designed to assist in managing a successful internet store.

Benefiting from a government SMART award for technology development, Actinic v8 has been re-written with an innovative object-oriented architecture providing a new WYSIWYG ‘Design View’. This provides point-and-click selection of both design and content objects.

See full details at www.actinic.co.uk/v8.

Greater Flexibility and Control

The new architecture makes content and design fully independent, allowing far greater flexibility in both design and functionality.
Items can be made to display, or functions execute, only if certain conditions are met; for example, to suppress the display of fields that are blank, or to display a warning message when a product is out of stock. Custom product fields can easily be created and restricted to a specific product category – enabling, for example, the creation of Author and ISBN fields for products in the category ‘Books’. And a new formatting toolbar allows the appearance of text to be changed more quickly and simply.

Comprehensive Marketing Features

All Actinic v8 products enable automatic or manual generation of ‘Best Sellers’ and ‘New Products’ lists, and the relating of products to other products, for cross-promotion and up-selling within the store and the cart. Actinic Business can also generate lists of ‘Also Bought’ items. Generation of mailing lists,including labels, envelopes and campaign reports, is now supported throughout the range.
Actinic Business users can filter lists by a variety of factors including order value, products ordered and geographical location.

A number of features have been migrated down the product range. Actinic Catalog gains support for customer accounts, and the ability to sell downloadable digital products such as MP3s.

Actinic Business gains support for bar coding.

One-click order completion has been migrated into all products from Actinic Business Multi-User, enabling more efficient order processing.

Enhanced Product Range & Pricing

A multi-site option has been added to Actinic Business, allowing users to build and manage unlimited sites from one licence. Actinic Business Multi-Site is priced at £1,250. Actinic Business Multi-User, offering multi-user order processing on a PC network as well as multiple site management, costs £1,500 for a 2-user system. Prices for Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business are unchanged from v7, at £379 and £799 respectively. All prices are subject to VAT.

Actinic v8 also sees the introduction of a new range of products developed specifically to meet the requirements of web designers. Actinic Designer (£350), together with Actinic Catalog Client (£200) and Actinic Business Client (£450), allow web designers to develop ecommerce sites for clients and brand them as their own, at a new low price point.

Actinic MD Phil Rothwell comments on the enhanced solutions: “Our annual ecommerce survey has shown that merchants are increasingly developing advanced web and ecommerce skills, and are looking for bigger and better things from their ecommerce system. The challenge has been to develop a package that satisfies these increased demands, while maintaining and even improving upon Actinic’s traditional ease of use for ecommerce beginners. We believe that v8 represents a huge advance on both fronts.”

For further comment contact:

Phil Rothwell
MD of Actinic
Tel 0845 129 4800
Email: prothwell@actinic.co.uk

Actinic PR:
Jane Lee
Dexterity
Tel +44 (0)1273 470199
Email: jane.lee at dexterity.co.uk

About Actinic Ltd:

Founded in 1996, Actinic specialises in helping small and medium retailers trade both online and offline using its ecommerce and EPOS packages.

Its ecommerce products include Actinic Designer, Actinic Business, Actinic Catalog, and Actinic Express, and power more UK ecommerce sites than any other company. Research shows that over 50% of SMEs using packaged software to run their e-stores use Actinic. Some of Actinic's better known UK users include the Royal Opera House, Adams kids’ fashion, Lloyds of London, the British Library and Help the Aged. Actinic EPOS products are designed by former retailers and give a comprehensive feature set that is straight forward to operate at great value prices.

Visit www.actinic.co.uk

Trademarks: Actinic Catalog is a registered trademark of Actinic Software Limited.

This press release was distributed via SourceWire, a service from Daryl Willcox Publishing, on behalf of Dexterity. For more information visit http://www.dwpub.com/pressreleasewires