Actinic User Conference - latest

[grantglendinnin]

I believe the feedback is all stored on the Feefo site and you just have a link through to their site to view the site ratings.

A couple of sites that use Feefo and you can see it in action are: http://www.ctshirts.co.uk and http://www.clifford-james.co.uk

The feedback cannot be moderated which is both a positive and negative feature. It will improve customer confidence if it is clear that the ratings are not edited but this could back fire if you have a problem that results in lots of negative comments.

It appears that the Feefo service was originally a free service, they then introduced paid for Pro version and now the free version is no longer.

Can someone from Actinic confirm if the Actinic user stops paying for Feefo, that the reviews they have gained on their products will not be automatically be removed from the Actinic users site?

Furthermore, as the entire system is held on Feefo's servers, what happens if a review left is abusive - does the Actinic user have to contact Feefo and wait on their response, which could take anything from a few minutes to several days, resulting in loss of trade...?

[Mike Hughes]

OK. fair enough. I'll hold off a while until we get some more details on the FeeFo proposals.

Mike

PS. Can I just say that I was very impressed by Peter Turner, the CEO of Creditcall. Ok, there wasn't much in the presentation but the man himself came across as someone I would trust with a key part of my business and was enough to finally convince me the move to Actinic Payments is a safe as well as sensible choice.

[cbarling]

Can we hold fire on the Feefo pricing for a bit please?

We have got some figures, but it's all so hot off the press that we haven't got everything lined up yet. In fact I only sent the signed contract back this week. If I say too much more, marketing will want to take me out and shoot me

Hopefully I can get news out in the fairly near future.

Chris

[malbro]

I'm sure there were other possibilities, and it's generally not true to say that only one company fits the requirements, but we do feel this will be a very successful initiative.

Chris

Do you have any idea of the sort of price band we are going to be looking at per year?

[cbarling]

We've actually been talking to Feefo on and off for a couple of years, and thinking about working with them. It was around two years ago that the Feefo founder, Bill Cawley, presented to our product management meeting.

It's important with partnerships that the companies are well established here (Trust Pilot doesn't even have a UK office), has appropriate technology, is interested in the market that Actinic addresses and looks like they are succeeding. They also need to be flexible on price so that a great deal can be offered to our own customers.

We feel that Feefo gets a tick in all of these boxes.

I'm sure there were other possibilities, and it's generally not true to say that only one company fits the requirements, but we do feel this will be a very successful initiative.

Chris

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

It looks to me that TrustPilot get a vast majority of the ratings from other sites, (pricegrabber, shopzilla, rreviewcentre, etc), for example ebuyer has 8820 ratings (PriceGrabber=7994, reviewcentre.com=288, TrustPilot users=16)

[Mike Hughes]

Good. Glad that's settled.

Next item on the agenda: FeeFo.

Not being familiar with them I thought at first they were a company I'd already run across. But no, that was a company called Trustpilot.

So why FeeFo? From what I can see FeeFo has about 120 customers rated and a total of 10,000 reviews over the last year.

Trustpilot has over 50,000 companies rated (including mine apparently) and about 1.5 million reviews. http://www.trustpilot.co.uk/ If you scroll down their page you can see the best and worst rated businesses which looks about right.

Oh, yes. and Trustpilot looks to be about half the price.

They way they work looks very similar so is there something about FeeFo that makes them preferable to TrustPilot?

Mike

[plantsforshade]

Thanks for the update I got the wrong end of the stick from Ben saying "you would come in in the morning and all the orders would be already downloaded"

Best wishes

Nigel

[cbarling]

That's right, the stock will be adjusted online and the syncing is so that EPOS / telephone orders and web orders all share the same stock levels.

The stock synchronisation is new code designed to run fast. When the sync happens, orders will also be downloaded. The user will have a choice on how frequently this runs.

So real time stock will run quite happily on the web site with your PC turned off.

Chris

[TraceyHand]

that's interesting because I'm sure I heard Ben mention something about setting a frequency of updates?
Maybe this was to sync back from server (which is 'realtime') to desktop so that your OFFline levels are accurate when you look at them.
'twas a long day yesterday. I've slept (and drunk LOL) since then

[Mike Hughes]

My understanding of the stock control is similar to Richard's. there is an online 'blob' the keeps track of the available stock on the server and is updated in real time.

The 'syncing' with the PC is to keep everything up to date when you alter stock on the PC. For example if you make sales in EPOS or via amazon or ebay.

You can switch off your Actinic PC and the Real Time Stock Control will still work quite happily. This is important as switching a 200W PC off for 12 hours overnight will save almost £100 a year in electricity, not to mention the environment, world, etc.

Mike

[TraceyHand]

Ben did confirm that stock adjustments were only made after successful, completed checkout orders so presumably this covers 'payment sent later' type orders (cheques, CC sent separately etc) but not ones that don't ultimately get paid/completed.
I'd be interested to know HOW Actinic knows though?
Receipt page generation is...flaky..at best. Especially with Paypal..but who's to say if it's successful any other way?

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

I still haven't been able to find out if the Feefo customer feedback is on our site or feefo's ?

I believe the feedback is all stored on the Feefo site and you just have a link through to their site to view the site ratings.

A couple of sites that use Feefo and you can see it in action are: http://www.ctshirts.co.uk and http://www.clifford-james.co.uk

The feedback cannot be moderated which is both a positive and negative feature. It will improve customer confidence if it is clear that the ratings are not edited but this could back fire if you have a problem that results in lots of negative comments.

It appears that the Feefo service was originally a free service, they then introduced paid for Pro version and now the free version is no longer.

[rmorrow]

Stock control will work on the server i.e. when a customer completes an order, their order quantity is reduced from the available stock in the on-line dataset (a file rather than a database). The upload from your PC is there to capture off-line stock changes i.e. MOTO orders, cancellations, stock adjustments, etc. So, no, you won't need to leave your PC on to have real time stock control. The only bit that is still unclear to me is how PSP-Pending orders are handled i.e. is stock reduced at checkout completion or after the callback from the PSP?

[TraceyHand]

ie that real time stock control will be achieved by your pc being constantly on so connected to the web 24 hours a day, and auto up/download will adjust stock levels on the site. Not by a database being remote from your pc.

That's how I understood it. You set it up, in Actinic, almost like a 'scheduled task' to sync it between orders/desktop and the server again.
That was how I understood it, anyway.