Actinic Business Version 8.0

Sales and marketing departments are probably spoilt the most with this new version of Actinic. The new best seller lists and new products lists features allow users to create a list of products that can appear on every page (or just on specific pages) to promote certain products. Naturally the best seller list works out the best selling products from the orders that have been received over a user-defined period, and displays them as a list in the store. However a nice touch is the ability to put your own "best sellers" into the list, and to then lock certain products into particular positions regardless of their actual sales figures. Likewise although the new products lists can be made up of the newest items that have been added to the store, but it's also possible to "cheat", and to keep certain products on the list for as long as you want.

In addition there are four types of discounting you can create within Actinic, the standard "5% off all orders over £25" and discounts based on product number such as "3 for the price of 2," discounts triggered by coupon codes, and loyalty discounts that depend on the customer type. Conversely it's also possible to change the system so that there's a surcharge paid if you order via credit card or other payment methods and with a bit of tweaking down to individual card types.

Version 8, is not just an upgrade from Version 7 but represents over three years of development work that started before the launch of Version 7 and was funded by a Smart award from the DTI's Small Business Service (SBS) back in 2003. Those three years of development work have produced a product that will be very hard to beat by any other product on the market. Actinic is now an enterprise-ready product, that retails at the cost of a small to medium sized product, and it's ready to use out of the box, unlike many of the enterprise competitors.