Why Actinic?

Actinic has helped tens of thousands of companies start selling online since its founding in England in 1996. Many major UK brands began with Actinic, and such British institutions as Oxford University's Bodleian Library and Taylor of Old Bond Street rely on Actinic for their online business. But our passion is to help thousands of smaller businesses compete with the big boys. And we feel our track record in this area is unrivaled. Here in the US and Canada, Actinic is the software choice for such successful enterprises as Pelican Case Midwest, Walt's Tractor Parts, and Door Closer Service Company, Inc.
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PCI Compliance

Actinic provides for 100% PCI Compliance when used with third-party payment processors. Unlike other Ecommerce software, Actinic utilizes Simple integration methods to connect your store to Payment Processor Sevices. Your customers credit card data never touches your website. This simple integration method makes Actinic uniquely PCI Compliant; out-of-the-box. No confusing PCI Questionnaires, no super-human efforts to attain PCI compliance, no tech-speak. Just immeadiate compliance. Save money with Actinic.

A complete range of award-winning, affordable packages

Since its foundation Actinic has continued to focus significant investment in the development of its range of products and services. Our development philosophy has centered on providing packages with the features you need at a price you can afford. The result is a complete range or product packages, which means you can choose a product to start with, and as your needs grow, you can easily upgrade to a more powerful system. For web designers and agencies who provide ecommerce services, we offer a Design package that allows them to design any number of websites designs and provide the Catalog or Business versions to their clients.

Business focused

We apply a business-focused approach to the needs of our customers. We pride ourselves on having built up a strong understanding of the business aspects of using technologies in a retail environment.You will find us high on business benefits and low on meaningless technical mumbo-jumbo. Actinic v10 is not just another online shopping cart. For an explanation of the advantages of desktop and server based systems in ecommerce see the article offline vs online.

Advantages of a desktop-based system in ecommerce

There is a general consensus in the IT community that all software and services are migrating to "cloud" based servers accessed across the Internet. We don't disagree, but a desktop-based system, working in tandem with an online ecommerce site, provides substantial advantages in ownership and control of your data, protection from hacking, and flexibility to host your online store with any service provider.
Ownership: A server-based model ties your future success to the business risk of the supplier. A desktop-based solution removes this risk.Where you own the software and have complete control of the data, you are protected against any change in your business fortunes or policies of a service of hosting supplier.
Hacking: The process of restoration of service after hacking of a "cloud" based solution may take days and involve highly skilled and expensive resources. With a desktop solution, after even the most sophisticated and painful hack another server (or part of a server) can be commissioned from a totally diverse supplier, the domain name pointed to the new server and "upload" in the desktop application initiated. A new service can be up and running in a few hours, leaving the infected server behind.
DDOS attacks: A distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack takes place when a hacker network instructs many PCs around the globe to bombard a particular web site with spurious requests. While relatively rare, these attacks do occur, and they can be catastrophic. The server gets overloaded and no legitimate traffic is able to get through. The online sales site will usually become unusable, costing orders, reputation and probably search engine rankings. With a desktop model, existing orders can continue to be processed and service and marketing activities can continue. It is also much easier to switch to a more robust server installation, if necessary.