Actinic offers three products for different customers. Actinic Catalog and Business are for small business owners who want to build and manage their own e-commerce sites. The third product, Actinic Designer, is for professional Web designers who want to build and launch e-commerce sites on behalf of clients. All received some upgrades in this latest version 8.

Actinic Catalog and Actinic Business consist of two components: 1) a Windows program that installs on your PC and allows you to create the pages for your e-commerce site and then download and process orders, and 2) a set of scripts that are installed at your Web site that provide the functions of the electronic shopping cart and ordering system.

Catalog is designed for e-tailers working on a budget, looking for a low-cost, entry- level solution for setting up a Web shop, though they can pay to upgrade to Business later, of course, as their needs grow.

Actinic Business offers the following capabilities not available in Catalog: downloads orders directly into Intuit's QuickBooks; supports Web coupons and discount codes; doesn't limit the customization of its check-out pages; supports linking to external databases; generates "also bought" lists and supports UPS online tools.

Upgrades for Both
Actinic Catalog Version 8 now lets you sell "digital" products such as music or image files. This capability to sell downloadable digital data was formerly offered only in Actinic Business.

And, now you can set up categories with certain segments or products categorized with specific variables. So, for example, all products classified as "Books" can require "ISBN numbers" or "authors," and all "CDs" can be associated with "artists."

Both products now offer a range of marketing and merchandising features that allow for cross-promotions and up-selling, some of which are similar to those seen on large, sophisticated online retail sites. These new features can be used to increase sales and build customer loyalty.

The programs automatically generate "best seller" and "new products" lists that can be used to promote fast-moving items and the latest merchandise. And the automatic generation of "related products" lists can encourage purchases by suggesting similar or complementary products to shoppers.

Both Catalog and Business have a new, automatic mailing-list generation feature that assists with e-mailing and snail mailing existing customers. Only Actinic Business, however, can create a list of "also bought" items to support up-selling. Its mailing list functionality can filter items by order value, products purchased, address and more.

New store management features include: one-click order completion; line price editing on the desktop; support for bar codes to process orders; improved tax reporting; user logon control; encryption of credit card data and support for labeling to assist in order processing.

Actinic's new "point-and-click" interface in version 8 is intuitive and provides stronger control over the design and layout of the store. The new "design tree" approach lets you easily navigate and access almost any part of your store. This makes it easier to add new items, move things around and group items in sections. Best of all, you don't have to know or understand HTML.

Building a Store
Both Catalog and Business offer lots of attractive, professional-looking templates that you can use to define the look and feel of your site, and it comes with lots of options to customize a site's look and feel, color scheme and more. To begin, a wizard walks you through the initial set up.

They also come with a library of design "snippets" that can be used as the basis of a store design. It's easy to edit and customize color schemes and page layouts and convenient new text-editing toolbars let you change text styles without using any HTML code. There's also a real-time preview of your store, so you can see it as you build it.

Using the new point-and-click interface makes it easy to create a store and add products, as well as manage details such as pricing, descriptions and more. After defining the look of the site and its layout, the software generates the static HTML pages that comprise your e-commerce site. When you're done building a site, upload it to your Web site and you're in business. Note that Business allows you to create, save and export your own custom color-schemes, but Catalog does not.

Taking Inventory
If you already have inventory in an electronic format, your product data can be transferred to your e-commerce site through an import wizard. Alternatively, you can manually input information by entering part numbers, names, descriptions, prices and tax treatments. Actinic's catalogs can support some 20,000 products. You can also link an image file with a product and configure hyperlinks that take shoppers to pages that present additional information.

Actinic Business has the ability to dynamically link to an external data source to build and update product inventory, though Catalog does not. This way, you can manage inventory in an application such as a spreadsheet or database program and publish it to Actinic Business.

Overwhelmed by all those pesky, yet important, details involved in getting products off the shelf and out the door? Don't be. Actinic's updated selling software offers strong order-processing features to handle both online and offline orders, calculate shipping, handling and taxes, monitor inventory during order processing, provide alerts for low stock levels and print invoices. In addition, the programs can print packing lists and address labels and generate customer e-mails.

For Web Designers
Actinic Designer offers lots of features for experienced Web designers who build e-commerce sites for their clients. New features allow designers to customize the user interface as well as modify the start-up screen.

Designers can now begin a design in Macromedia Dreamweaver and integrate the design into Actinic. A site's user interface can be modified by creating and configuring tabs that are presented in the user interface, allowing designers to specify which tabs will appear for particular clients.

Actinic Catalog is available for $499. Actinic Business is available for $1,499. Actinic Designer is available for $499. Actinic Link for QuickBooks POS Cost $499.00. You can download a 30-day trial of Actinic and try it out for free.

Bottom Line
Actinic's family of products offer a viable means for small business owners to easily build e-commerce sites and sell products on the Web. It's one solution that is worth consideration when you're ready to make that leap into cyber-sales.

Actinic Catalog requires: a Pentium PC; Windows 95, 98, 2000 or NT 4.0; minimum 32MB RAM; minimum 60MB of disk space and internet access. At the Web site, Actinic catalog requires a standard commercial Web package that includes: at least 5MB of Web space (depending on the size of the catalog); CGI-BIN with Perl 5 or later and FTP access. Actinic offers free e-mail support and 30 days free telephone support.