Ecommerce Solution needed for growing company

[James Ball]

Hi

First of all appologies if this is posted in the wrong section but i could not find an appropriate one.

I am an online retailer and I have out grown my current software, I am looking for a system that will run multiple websites from a single interface and a single stock database.

In more detail I need to be able to list a product on one or all of my websites and edit all of my websites from a single piece of idiot proof software hosted either locally or externally. Hopefully enabling me to then edit products separately on each website if I need to.

Currently I run a highly modified version of Qshop and have 4 websites all with individual interfaces and stock inventories. I have about 1500 product lines but I am hoping to expand to 5000+ soon and open a lot more websites so my current solution will not be suitable for long.

I like all the features that actinic has and was hoping to be able to use actinic as the base program.

Is there any one out there who could help me achieve this in the form of either advice or selling me a bespoke or off the shelf piece / software?

Any advice will be happily received (apart from “it’s not possible”)

It is quite difficult to explain my entire needs without talking to some one so if you could please reply with contact detail or that would be great

James Ball

[meden]

Any advice will be happily received (apart from “it’s not possible”)

oh dear...I think you are not going to be happy! AFAIK (and there are several recent threads touching on this subject) it is not possible (sorry) to run more than one Actinic store from a single database, though if I am wrong I'm sure somebody much more knowledgeable than me (not difficult btw) will soon let you know

[Rich Brady]

Lee has said this on another thread in the last couple of days I think. If you go with actinic you will need to create 4 Top Level Sections (One for each of your sites).

Each of these sections could be designed so that they appear to be different sites (colour/logos/branding/etc), but would use one product base and a single checkout, which would make you life a little easier I think.

Actinic should easily cope with 5000 products even using SPP...

I'm sure you could have 4 different domain names for the different sections and have them redirected to:

• www.mainsite.co.u/acatalog/section1.html
• www.mainsite.co.u/acatalog/section.html
• www.mainsite.co.u/acatalog/section3.html
• www.mainsite.co.u/acatalog/section4.html

That way any business cards, advertising campaigns could be tailored to each specific business line.

[Chunkford]

What back office system are you using at the moment?

[James Ball]

Our current back end software is a heavily modded versio of Qshop but there data base doen not relly allow what i need unless the whole thing is rebuilt.


I just spoke to actinic support (i wasn’t very impressed with there manners or knowledge to be honest) they said that it is possible to (I cant remember the technical wording) use a external stock data base and adjust each of the sites network settings to look and feed from that database, therefor it must be possible to create a tool to enable management of this.

[Chunkford]

Sorry I meant what accounting package are you using?

[James Ball]

Oh... Quickbooks Pro 2006

[Chunkford]

I have sent you a message

[leehack]

Good shout Rich, this is exactly how I would approach this area too. If you know what you are doing with variables, blockifs and CSS, you can make as many different sites as you like within the main one, whilst also having an easy to maintain business. I think the word 'niche site' has driven a lot of people to split their current sites into numerous smaller other ones, which in turn often increases workload and hassle, but with no real positive impact on sales.

[James Ball]

webD

Thanks for the idea of multiple top sections, would there be any limit to the number of stores or product you could run using this method? and would the underlying sub sections all be on the same url as the top one. i want the sites to seem seperate to the customers.

[Darren B]

they would be the same url's, basically your designing different sections in your stock to look like different stores not running them on different url's.

The only other way is seperate sites and one backend account packages to handle all the stock and invoices.

NOTE
Actinic does not do stock control, there is no real time stock and over ordering on the web is possible

[James Ball]

NOTE
Actinic does not do stock control, there is no real time stock and over ordering on the web is possible

It can tell you how many of a certain product you have cant it?? just not in real time. Over ordering on some of our product would be fine as we can get them sent next day by our supplier but for other product like cloths it would be a problem as we would not be able to get any more, however people dont tend to bulk buy cloths.