Should I Spend £1400 on Sellerdeck 13?

[nm-motorsport]

I am still working on Actinic v7 Developer and thought it was about time I brought everything up to date. The equivalent Sellerdeck package is £1400 + VAT.

I have another much cheaper web design package I use for websites without an online shop and I have found it much more flexible and easier to use in terms of design capabilities etc than Actinic. It also has the facility to add an online shop and checkout etc which can be populated from a database.

I would be interested to hear opinions as to why users have decided on Sellerdeck in favour of other more generic website design packages?

[jont]

The gap between v7 and v12 is enormous - especially on the design front you will notice massive difference.

The main convincing points for me are :

1. ease of product maintenance - adding new and maintaining
2. back office order management
3. desktop based
4. integration with SellerDeck Payments with 3rd man checking
5. easy code access - design the site pretty much how you want it
6. support - from SellerDeck and community
7. site ownership - I paid for it and I own it

I have looked at other packages and use them from time to time but for me SellerDeck in unsurpassed for the money. It is exceptional value for money. As with all packages there are weaknesses and strengths with each offering something the other has and has not - on balance SellerDeck ticks all the boxes for me as a developer and a site owner.

Since v9 the ease of access to the code made a huge leap forward. As a developer it is now so easy to get your hands dirty and do pretty much what you want design wise.

ps : I am not a reseller or affiliated to SellerDeck - just a user of their software.

[NormanRouxel]

And from your customers point of view there are a lot of things that may help increase sales: Automatic New Products / Best Sellers / Recently Viewed / Pagination, Filtered Products / Search, etc.

[nm-motorsport]

Going down the list of 7 points, the only one my other software doesn't meet is the back office order management but for £1400 + VAT I can live without that.

Looking at the features that may increase sales, I don't think they were in v7 so they may be useful. I think I may need to try a trial version to see how much different it is but my disappointment with v7 was that it wasn't easy to change the design without getting really involved and I never really got to grips with it in the way I had hoped despite having some success with the websites I designed using it.

[jont]

v12 design is now all done within the program - simply click on the part of the layout you want to change in the preview panel and the code shows beneath. No more messing with Act_PrimaryLayout.html via Windows Explorer.

You can even right click on stylesheet classes and go straight to the relevant selector in the actinic.css file ... all within SellerDeck itself.

If you have Dreamweaver there is also a standard extension allowing you to design the outer layout in DW and import straight in to SellerDeck. Very neat.

[Neil Bayton]

Hey,

Jont I can see a future for you in sales.

Nigel, I have attempted to contact you, but if we have not talked since V7 you may have different contact details now.

You have different options if you already have developer V7 and want to upgrade to SellerDeck 2013 (V12) at far less than the prices quoted above.

Please feel free to give me a call on 01932 358348 to discuss your options.

[NickD]

I suspect you might be able to take a support contract and have the upgrade under this at less than buying the software

You will need the support as I have found that migrating up from that many versions (i inherited a v9 that had been upgraded from 7) will mean you have lots of conflicts between your old templates and the way things work now. The main challenge for me is that I have tons of old outdated layouts and it is not always clear which the "current" layouts are and which the old ones, and you end up with things not quite working right just because something in a layout is outdated.

If you know and like your other software it could be frustrating to fight with this one again though, no matter how many improvements

[NormanRouxel]

When making a big leap (like from V7), it may be best to forgo the V7 layouts and start afresh with a completely new SD 2013 Theme.

This doesn't mean that you have to re-do all your Sections and Products. You can export the content tree (File / Export) and re-import it (File / Import) into a clean SD 2013 site. You also need to copy your images (hopefully they're all in a sub-folder(s) of your V7 Site folder) into the same place in the SD 2013 Site folder before doing the import.

UPDATE: Just to be sure this was still do-able, I just tried Exporting / Importing an ancient V7 Demo Site into a clean SD 2013.

Initially got some errors regarding a couple of old CUSTOMVARS and their definitions / headers so simply deleted these lines from the textfile as they aren't relevant in SD 2013.

Then got an error on each product which was due to the old site using 17.5% VAT which was easily fixed with a single global find / replace on the import file using Notepad (replace all 1750 with 2000). You probably wouldn't have this problem on a current V7 site as the VAT rates would be current.

Then had to find a few missing Brochure images that I hadn't copied over in advance.

After that, I had all the Brochure page, Sections and Products moved over and ready to sell. Took about 5 minutes from scratch.

[mediamole]

Agree with Norman best approach when a V7 site would be start fresh and export Database and images into a clean install of 2013 and work from there. Alternatively, could do an incremental upgrade from V7 to V8 + but long winded.