So what do you think so far?

[aisha]

I'm new here Hi
A friend of mine suggested I look into Actinic. I'm a start-up, looking to develop a webstore. I have database tech back ground and may be able to get a little help from a few friends.

I'm thinking of the Express product, what kind of timescales does it take to set-up and would you recommend this product to someone based on your experience of it?

[pinbrook]

It depends on how dirty you want to get.

Express is fine as an introductory store, but there are limitations as to what you can do design wise. There are also probably limitations re functionality compared to full catalog

Its a cheap entry level product since it has the monthlu fee. If you choose Actinic catalog there will be greater start up costs.

You would need to phone sales about timescales etc, I would also have a list of the functionality you require to check it meets your needs

[Ali00001]

Hi Aisha,
We have had our Express store set up since August last year. I would say it took an evening to get the basics set up then quite a few evenings to get all the products on - but that largely depends on how much detail you need to put for each product. Since then it just takes a bit of fiddling every week to keep it up to date and looking ok. Photos are a headache but that would be the case for any website.

There are aspects of Express that are irritating (have a look at the wish list thread about Express to find the issues that we are all currently getting annoyed about) but on the whole I think is is a great solution for the first couple of years. One great thing about it for us is that it is web based and, just like webmail, we can both access it from our homes to make changes, it is not restricted to one PC. I love the simplicity of it most of the time and I am especially glad we are using it when I watch my hubby tearing his hair out when major things have gone wrong with his Actinic Catalogue website!

I think the main thing that will make us upgrade is when we are getting enough orders per day that we do not have time to enter them all into Sage manually and we need some kind of automatic transfer of info into Sage. But that is a while down the road.