How often do you have problems with Actinic ?

[fuzzie bear]

..whether it be uploading problems, customers are having problems ordering etc

I'm at the stage where i'm having problems every week

eg customers get to a certain point in their cart and can't get any further
- Customers think the whole system is too complicated
- Adding new products causes the system to periodically freeze
- Orders that are on the sytem - when you go into them crash actinic. I
Cannot delete them or print them or view them

I have a lot more but don't want to bore you's all with details.

I have approx 1500 products on the system and refreshing the website takes about 2 hours - with broadband !

[Mike Hughes]

In my experience I only suffer the kind of problems you talk about once every 6 months or so.

You should only have to do a 'refresh' when you upgrade or things go wrong and you have to clear the server and start again. An 'update' would only upload what's changed and is much quicker.

Mike

[jont]

2 hours with broadband is horrendously slow (unless you have some monster image / files to upload) as 1500 products is relatively small compared to some users sites and what Actinic can handle.

In respect to some of your other concerns these sound like a possible hosting issue - so may be worth checking with them or moving to a Actinic specialist host if you are not already.

Customers thinking the whole system is too complicated can be reolved with your navigation and how you have structrured your site / templates. If users are getting stuck in a specific location it may be worth adding in a FAQ link from all pages - I did this 6 months back and the number of support emails, phone calls and dropped orders dropped markedly. Most issues tend to stem from the checkout area so it may be worth adding into the various Act_Order templates notes on what is expected and what is coming up in the next screen.

Which version of Actinic are you running? I am on v7.0.4 and this is very stable for me and other than the odd snapshot error (usually after a lot of work on the products etc and a compact database resolves) I don't have any issues at all

[pinbrook]

Yes I'd agree the problems you state are unusually high

[RuralWeb]

I would agree it sounds very high - most of the sites I have are really running themsleves with very few problems.

[wjcampbe]

Once in eighteen months. And it turned out to be my own fault.

[pinbrook]

- Adding new products causes the system to periodically freeze
- Orders that are on the sytem - when you go into them crash actinic. I
Cannot delete them or print them or view them

These issue are related to your PC/actinic. Is the pc very old, when did it last get overhauled (XP seems to degrade after 12 months and requires a rebuild).

Have you compacted the database?
Have you taken a site backup and snapshot and then reinstalled actinic

customers get to a certain point in their cart and can't get any further

this is either due to changes made to actinic or a hosting issue
Customers think the whole system is too complicated

can you show us an example of this and we can suggest how to simplify

[fuzzie bear]

Ok...

- PC is 2 years old - very high spec. Never considered a rebuild - but might try it.

- Hosting is with ipowerweb.com in the U.S. I have my hosting for another site letshost.ie and its about the same speed for uploading.

- Yes, I compact the database regularly

- No haven't reinstalled actinic because I have an old cd and after installing and then running upgrades, then I have to refresh every website I have running and with 4 websites thats hours !

Quote:
"customers get to a certain point in their cart and can't get any further"
..this is either due to changes made to actinic or a hosting issue

I haven't made any changes to actinic lately except to my service provider - but that was about 2 weeks ago. Since I've started compacting and refreshing my website, people seem to be able to place orders again.

"Customers think the whole system is too complicated"
I'm not the person that takes the complaints for the system, but i've been told they think the whole checkout process is very long and then with the errors they've been getting about page not found its driving my customers away.

How can I tell if its a hosting issue, software issue or I just have two many images etc... (even when I have the preview pane open and am moving from product to product it takes ages to load)

[wjcampbe]

I have an old cd That is easily fixed - download the full install of your current version and make your own cd - then you only need to install that once - no need to install the cd first and then work through the patches - they are cumulative.