Actinic vs OS Commerce Rebuild

[red_sea]

I am looking to use Actinic V8 Catalog for a complete rebuild of a current site which is using OS Commerce.

Does anyone know if there is anything on OS Commerce that cannot be possibly done on Actinic, so I can let my client know before I rebuild?

Also there are around 500+ products on this site, should I consider Actinic Business or will Catalog suffice?

Many Thanks

[NormanRouxel]

OSC uses a server side mySQL database and generates pages dynamically from that database using PHP.

Actinic generates static HTML pages using a Section (category) structure that is fixed by the shop owner / designer.

The main operational difference between the two is the provision of real-time data. Particularly, Actinic will not do real-time stock control so items only go out of stock after a download of orders and re-upload of the changed site.

There are undoubtedly numerous other differences. It's very hard to answer an "is there anything" type question.

As to the number of products, this isn't a consideration between Catalog and Business. Both will work well with many thousand products.

Business is intended (among other things) for B2B type sites, where you have customer dependent pricing. If you're selling only to the public Catalog may be enough. Best checkout the Feature Matrix that will be somewhere on www.actinic.co.uk.

[red_sea]

thanks for your answer, that kinda sums it up

[MASTERforge]

and V8 both have their advantages and disadvanteges.

With you can really customise your site in anyway imaginable just by adding contributions. This is great when they are stable but often they are not and a tiny error in code can completely fry your site. This is one of the reasons I went to actinic. I had added so many contributions it made it very unstable.

Actinic is really difficult to customise and it has given me many hours of headaches. V8 isn't supported by user-manuals although the support is largely maintained by kind users willing to help us along. You can usually find your answer in the forum or by posting.

The backend where you download orders is far more advanced in v8 than . I find it easy and intuitive. Also connecting to PSP's is very easy. I use PayPal. All I had to do to set it up was make it active and add my email. Tax and posting costs are easy to set up too. I had real problems trying to sort this out with OSC.

V8 has proved very well when search engines deal with it. I have been quite surprised how well it indexes it. I think it probably is better than . Within a couple of months my site is performing in the top pages of the product searches.

There are many things on the wish list for V8 to make it perfect but to come to a conclusion:

is easier to play around with whilst actinic gives solid results.

I am willing to sacrifice usability for results and I am keeping V8. It's definitely worth investing money in your shopping cart.