U.S.A actinic sites

[Kerri]

Some questions for any American Actinic users or UK businesses that have US sites with payments in USD to a US bank account.

Not sure if i'm in the right forum for an answer to these questions - is there a US specific forum or is this forum open to worldwide Actinic users ?

I am considering buying Actinic Developer to allow me to develop a number of online shops/sites for my new US based business(es). Then buying a license for each site to operate using catalog.

I am familiar with the UK products and know that prices can be shown in various currencies, presumably, you just link up with a payment service provider that can process all order payments and set up the payments configuration as required.

Questions/Information sort:

1) UK or US Version of actinic?
If i buy Actinic Catalog licenses - UK version - will i be able to use it on my US web site/shop or MUST i buy the US version of ALL?

2) Where can i find out about secure PSPs in the US?
e.g what do they have instead of Protx, Worldpay etc,
Presumably, it's similar to here where you need to get merchant services and a secure payment service provider - in the UK we use Cardnet + Protx - what's the US equivalent?

3) Yahoo shop hosting??
I've seen many site using Yahoo shop hosting, whereby customers pay (what looks like yahoo), although this may work, i think that each business should appear stand alone and take their own payments - it is so much more profesional and gives the customer more confidence in your company, products, services and aftersales care! Can anyone correct me?

4) US banking services
Can anyone advise me on what US banks can offer in terms of merchant services and the pros & cons of each major bank.
E.g Bank of America, Wells Fargo, SunTrust etc...
In particular, how long does it take for funds to be credtied (from the merchant services provider) to the business bank account.

5) US online retailer associations
Are there any worth mentioning?
Are there any forums for online retailers?

T.I.A for all advice, web links and information sources quoted.

[I-CC]

As far as Uk or US is concerned, there are different versions, but we operate US site with UK Developer software.

Just set the default currency to US for a start off and then worked through from there.

As for payment processing, they use WorldPay which is worldwide anyway and connects them to their US banks etc.

Hope it helps.

[chrisbrown]

The US version of Actinic has integration with UPS on-line software which provides accurate shipping cost calculation and gives the customers the ability to track their order.

When will the European version get this?

[cbarling]

The US version of Actinic is available from Sure Solutions. Click on Actinic.com and follow the US links.

This forum is open to both UK and US customers.

The differences between the US and UK versions are :

- US version set up to use USD and calculate Sales Tax, rather than VAT. The UK version can be changed, with a bit of fiddling, to work this way.

- the US version (Business) has integration with UPS online tools including pricing, address validation and tracking. There is also an interface to the Worldship UPS desktop application

- the US version uses a different (US) version of the Quickbooks interface

- the US version comes with Authorize.net as its PSP. This is one of the leading US PSPs and is very good value

- Paypal is a chargable option for the US version

> When will UPS integration be available in Europe?

I'm not sure what the status is, I will enquire.

Chris
Actinic

[garyhay]

Hi Chris nice to see you are still about.

What about using our http://www.reactivesamples.com/acatalog site as the Audio Store demo.

Should be ready middle of next week

[cbarling]

Very nice, Gary.

Thanks for the offer, but we've already developed an example audio store.

Chris
Actinic

[Jan]

The Mole End plugins all work very nicely for the US (and are available from Sure Solutions) except for Mailing Labels, we are still waiting for US cusomters to request these.

Regards,

[garyhay]

Chris

The example store you refer to (have you seen it) does not even have any music available on it or anything for digital download.

ADDED LATER: I take that back as I did get a MP3 download :END

http://www.actinicaudiostore.com/acatalog/index.html

I am sure Ford would not expect you to test drive the latest Focus without an engine.

We could develop a version of our store with only 1 loop per product to make the load time faster.

[cbarling]

To answer the question on when the UPS integration might be available in the UK version, as promised. There is a fair amount of work to get this done. So we will have to consider doing this in a future major release.

Chris
Actinic

[chrisbrown]

Patience is a virtue...

As far as UPS integration goes, I do hope that when you say UK version you actually mean European version. My main customer is based in The Netherlands and uses UPS for all his shipping.

Thanks for the news anyway.