where can I buy it?

[monosodiumg]

Not from Actinic direct as far as I can tell.

[pinbrook]

just do a search on the internet

[monosodiumg]

Have searched. Can find v6 but not v7. The resellers listed on Actinic's site for v7 are all offering v6 not v7.
I eventually discovered the "buy online" button tucked in the top right corner (they should perhaps read there own manual on designing e-commerce sites and when I follow the "buy from actinic" link I find v6 and not v7.
I'm told Actinic are No1 in their market and I read good reviews of the product and I've spent a month witheh v6 demo and I like it.
On the other hand I find that their own ecommerce site, which I would expect to be a model of good practice and which should be dead simple since it's only selling a very few products with very few options, is unusable.

I resent having to do a lot of searching to buy the product. Our household spent over 5K online in that last 12 months on a wide range of products from at least 5 countries and buying Act Cat 7 is so far the most difficult purchase I've attempted. I'm a software developer, not an unpaid sales assistant for Actinic.

[cbarling]

Whoops, sorry about that.

Now fixed.

You can also call sales on 0845 129 48 00 - thye would love to speak to you :-)

Chris
Actinic

[pinbrook]

Actinic V7 was only released last week. I am sure that any supplier who has v6 on their website will supply V7.

We don't always live in a perfect world.

Incidently if you phoned Actinic they would sell to you direct.

[monosodiumg]

>You can also call sales on 0845 129 48 00
>if you phoned Actinic they would sell to you direct.
LOL. So much for Actinic doing ecommerce!!

Thx to cbarling for getting it fixed. The purchase will be made shortly!

BTW, you should think about putting a link for shopping in the left hand and/or top menu, and a "buy now" link on the product description pages. It's common practice on ecommerce sites and the path to the point where you part the customer from their cash should always be as easy and obvious as possible [I think your documentation says something to that effect). I didn't notice the "buy online" icon at the top right unitl at least my 5th visit to your site. I guess I didn't look there because it's not where you normally get buy/shop links.

[george]

I've got to stick up for Actinic here. I'm sure any problems ordering is due to it still being in the initial stages (and still being in a sort of test mode) of V7.

The Actinic staff (and many others) are most helpful on here, and on the phone. Its actually recommended to wait till the first release before using anyway, so it will be worth the wait.

[monosodiumg]

george,

I agree completely about the helpfulness on the forums. THe forums seem to be very effective and the actinic folk are active and helpful on them.

The teething troubles excuse for the site shopping problems don't cut any ice with me. There's no excuse for such a poorly designed shopping experience, least of all from Actinic. Physician heal thyself.

I can't make head or tail of the recommendation to wait until the first release so I'm ignoring it. This is perhaps another presentational problem. It doesn't make sense to 'release' a new full public sold version and tell customers not to buy it until the first service pack/next version/release/whatever comes out.
Either clearly label it a beta or pre-release version or don't say anything to muddy the waters. There's nothing controversial or new here. Most software houses do this already. It's common to publish beta or pre-release versions but they are always labelled as such.
If the v7 version I have just bought exhibits a lot of problems, then Actinic will get an appropriate slagging. Either sell it as fully working or tell people it's a beta and don't sell it.

[cbarling]

We recommend that people don't upgrade until the first maintenance release. The key word is upgrade.

If you have a working store, it's not worth taking any risks and ecommerce software is notoriously difficult to get right. Any combination of the desktop software/router/proxy/firewall/line/server router/server proxy/server firewall/server software can cause problems. Believe me, we know from bitter experience.

However, before we released the product we tested it extensivley internally, did an alpha, did a private beta and did a public beta. So yes, it is production code.

On the question of poor promotion of online purchasing direct from Actinic, I have to agree with you and we will be looking at this. There are some historical reasons but I won't bore you with the details.

I hope some of this background helps.

Chris
Actinic

[pinbrook]

Whilst we are talking about the website, Chris, isn't it about time you made it cross resolution friendly. For a business in the IT/Web world, a 800x600 designed site is pretty slack!

[monosodiumg]

Thank you very much cbarling!
That clarifies the release situtation and is quite sensible. I'm not an upgrader but a new user so I can safely go for v7 .

You also have my respect for acknowledging the site's shopping experience isn't all it could be and my for committing Actinic to doing something about it.

I have a trial of v6 that expired a few days ago and have just bought v7. Can I donwload and work with v7 until the box arrives?

[Darren B]

if you download V7 when you box arrives just enter the auth code supplied with you instead of selecting evaluate,


Cheers
Darren

[monosodiumg]

Thx.

[mj2003]

Originally posted by monosodiumg
BTW, you should think about putting a link for shopping in the left hand and/or top menu, and a "buy now" link on the product description pages. It's common practice on ecommerce sites and the path to the point where you part the customer from their cash should always be as easy and obvious as possible

FWIW, I too had this problem. I just couldn't find any way to buy the darned software on the Actinic site. Not in the menus, not in the links. Then when I complained it was pointed out to me that at the top of each page it has a graphic saying "buy online now". Click it, and you go to the pages on where to buy, and that includes an actinic link. Somehow I just feel that the graphics at the top of a site are just adverts, particularly when on a site for shopping cart software. It doesn't look like a button to click.

Which reminds me - we redesigned our site recently, and everyone liked the new look. But our web orders just stopped. Literally. We get some lulls, so it was a few weeks before we realised, and had a look. It really wasn't clear any more that you could buy online. We added a big red button to the site menu saying "buy online now", and - I really hate this part - within two hours we'd had three web orders. Just how many did we miss in that time?