Re: FN-FORUM Actinic Catalog (was: Sites in a box)

date posted 1st November 2000 18:01

Hi Ray,

Actinic have added stock management functionality now, though it only
updates the stock levels by downloading new orders from the site, so it's
kind of an offline solution.

A client of mine bought ShopAssistant without doing any research and wanted
me to set it up so that they could modify stock and product descriptions and
product photos in-house, oh and er, easily.

Ha! Yeah right.... Any of you who have developed a site using ShopAssistant
will know what I mean on this one.

Basically, they'd have to go and edit the html directly to be able to change
anything at all. This was waay beyond their capability.

Needless to say I told them to send it back. A bespoke solution would have
been the real answer but their budget was small and this is going back a
couple of years ago now. Even Actinic is pretty complex for the average
businessperson to get to grips with.

ruth arnold
spacehoppa.com

> I would like to echo Richard Eaton's comments. About a year ago I spent
> around six weeks wrestling with Actinic to buid an ecommerce site for a
> client who wanted a 'basic' solution.
>
> After the site was launched he wondered where the stock catalogue was and
> why it didn't warn him when stock was running low and why items on the
> site weren't automatically marked as out of stock.
>
> In other words, what he really wanted was a complete bespoke database
> driven site! Having said that, Actinic has an excellent "backend" order
> handling facility based on MSAccess which any client familiar with MS
> software should have no trouble in using
>
> On the next e-commerce project I decided to try out ShopAssistant which
> is basically a kit of Javascript parts which you can bolt on to a site
> the rest of which you have designed yourself using whatever tools you
> like.
>
> Eventually, that ran into the ground because if you want to do something
> which is non-standard, again it was very tricky, or impossible to
> customise. Having said that, the manual which is provided with
> ShopAssistant (and which is free to download from the website) is an
> excellent all round e-commerce primer. (www.floyd.co.uk)
>
> In the end it did not take much longer to write a shopping cart
> application from scratch using mySql and PHP than I wasted trying to
> customise the out-of-th-box applications.
>
> I now have code of my own which I modify for future projects and which
> can be customised to do almost anything.
>
> If anyone would like me to quote for developing a "backend" for one of
> their projects I'd be happy to oblige.
>
> Ray McGinty