Actinic User Conference - latest

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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)

[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

[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]

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

[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.

[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...?

[Darren B]

the only concern i have with putting my eggs in one basket is what happen if i decide i dont want feefo anymore?

Im guessing all my ratings will be wiped clean, and i bet i wont own the rights to the data either. If i cancel then my site rating is cancelled aswell this i can understand but the lost product reviews would be a PITA. From what i understand the codepath system still gives you access to your data / is stored with actinic.

[leehack]

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

Come on Chris this is all a bit woolley. You've told us you've been speaking to them for 2 years. You said there would be something exciting to be announced at the conference, it is now announced, people are interested and want to get some fundamental information.

Given you've signed the agreement recently, one assumes you've sorted the pricing out before doing that, so let us know please. If you pander to marketing, you might just lose the interest of a lot of people, whose interest you tried to gain in the first place.

If you announce new things like this, surely you can appreciate people are going to want to know about it immediately. If you can't give that info, surely holding back any mention of the solution is a better idea. Communication seems such a difficult concept with Actinic at times.

[Rich Brady]

Personally I would have liked to have seen Ben go deeper into the stock control and feedback issue.

Some sort of demo would have been a great addition. I appreciate that time was sort, but IMO it was an oppertunity to really get my juices going

[guccij]

As we managed to go out of stock on two normally slow items yesterday while I was at #actinic09, v10 and the new stock control can't come soon enough