Creating a Bilingual Site / Integrating with EPOS

[OWffi]

Has anyone developed a bilingual Actininc online store? Am looking to develop a Welsh / English site.

Also looking at potential for integrating online sales with offline sales (from two existing retail outlets), to enable centralised stock control and sales reports. The EPOS system used can export to an Access engine (hence evaluation of Actinic). Anyone able to share experience, problems, integration costs etc?

Cheers

[NormanRouxel]

Which EPOS system are you using?

Norman

[Jan]

Actinic allows you to edit all of the report/website prompts, so you would have a few options:

1) Have all text in Welsh and English.
This allows you to have one product for each actual product and would be fairly easy to do - it might look a bit unwieldy though.

2) Have two sites, one in welsh and one in English
Easy to set up but the orders would end up in two different places and you would need to have two licenses.

3) Have one site with a top level section for the products in welsh and another for the products in English, then for common areas such as checkout have the text in both languages.
Easy to set up again but you would have two copies of every product and so analysing sales might be difficult.


Regards,

[OWffi]

The EPOS system is SamStockV3, which includes an import / export module and Sage Line50 module.

Whilst we believe that the product info in SamStock can be exported into an MS access database, it would be preferrable if sales / product details could be imported back into it from the web site backend. This could be sufficient at the end of the trading day, to allow the company to reflect stock levels for replenishing the retail outlets and to have stock at hand for fulfilling the virtual store.

Have you come across any example sites designed using Actinic that use Welsh and English as per your suggestions Jan? One problem I might forsee in development of two top levels is that we are looking at 6000 product variations to begin with, doesn't Actinic have a limit of 10,000?

One of the areas were were facing was bespoke Vs off-the-shelf and this is why we looked at Actinic since it has many of the features required for the site.

[Jan]

Actinic has a supported product limit of 10000, I have a customer with 50000. If you only have 6000, I don't think that you will have a problem.

I would actually recommend having an external database to hold your product details, then you can enter a welsh and english description in there and generate an Actinic import or use external linking to get the information into Actinic - if you use external linking then Actinic can be set up to decrement stock levels on the external database (although having two copies of each product would complicate this.

Regards

[OWffi]

In this case, do you foresee an export file from the EPOS system to an MS Access database, and then an export from here to Actinic?

If this is the best option, would you still see the need for investment in Actinic? Or would we be better off just developing a bespoke database driven site?

Many Thanks for your help

Ffion

[Jan]

If you can link to Sage, Actinic has a Sage link so you could use that to transfer data between the two.

Actinic is easy to use (It must be because I have an Actinic online shop and I can't even write HTML) providing you can be flexible with design and the shipping model suits you. You get a load of order processing facilities included with it which makes life easier once the site it up and running. The time taken to develop the site can be minimal. (for example, I am about to launch a new site and expect to spend 4 hours writing it - one of which has already been spent talking to my host on the phone about life the universe and everything ;-) - it only has one product so that make is easier to sort out. I (realistically) expect to make my first sale within two weeks, that is pretty good going really.

For me the choice between a writing a database driven site and writing one using an off the shelf product has to be down to time available for development, design requirements, tax and shipping constraints and order processing requirements. Analyse those, work out costs for each method and you will be sorted.

Regards,

[OWffi]

Great Thanks for your help and all the best with the new online store

[Jan]

By the way - I'm not a web designer and I haven't written any commercial database driven websites so you should probably take my opinion on writing ecommerce stores with a pinch of salt.

Regards,

[chrisbrown]

Writing your own bespoke webstore is a non-trivial undertaking. It should only be considered if you have good professional programming expertise. There are lots of hidden pitfalls. With a mature product such Actinic (version 6 and counting) you avoid all that. To create something anywhere near as good as Actinic will take a lot of work.

You would be better off putting your efforts into integrating existing software products (e.g. Actinic, automation moles, accounting packages, etc) to achieve the desired result. Jan's suggestion is sound and that is the route that I would take.

I design and develop e-business applications for a living. Only the biggest clients choose to develop their own webshop as they know that it will cost a lot time, effort and money. I know of one company that has just recently decided to develop their own webstore. It's going to take 6 months with a team of 5 expert developers.

[OWffi]

Cheers.

Yep, as you stated Actinic is a well developed product and that's why we were looking at it. Were're anticipating a quotation of around 10k - 15k for a bespoke system. Going down the off-the-shelf route would certainly speed things up on the development / launch side as well as reduce development costs.

The route for product information would actually be in the EPOS system, there is no integration with Sage Line 50 at present. Would you therefore suggest an ms access database between the epos system and actinic?

thanks

[chrisbrown]

It all depends on where you are going to store the two language texts. If they can both go into the EPOS system then you're laughing... You would just need to export all the product info from EPOS to some intermediate file. This file can then be manipulated (by a small piece of bespoke software) and imported into Actinic.

If the EPOS can't handle two language texts then an additional database will be required. The data exported from EPOS would be supplemented with that stored in the external database (i.e. the 2 language texts) and then imported into Actinic.

The EPOS to Actinic to website process can be completely automated.

Downloading orders and importing them into EPOS is even simpler as that is already a part of Actinic. The only additional requirement might be that the Actinic export format needs transforming prior to import into the EPOS.

Contact me offline if you wish to discuss this in greater depth.

[OWffi]

Brilliant - thanks for the response and for the offer of contacting you off-line. May take you up on that if that's ok!

In the meantime think I need to take another look at the EPOS system and see how everything could potentially gel together. No doubt this process will stimulate more queries!!

Thanks everyone for your helpful responses so far

[SarahPris]

SamStock & Actinic

Hi Ffion

I'm having my website developed in Actinic and I use SamStock in my shop. Did you go down the Actinic route in the end and, if so, did you successfully integrate Actinic and SamStock so that the stock levels and products were kept aligned between the two?

Thanks
Sarah

[NormanRouxel]

Ffion's post was about 1 year ago, so this thread may no longer be monitored. It might be better to look up their Profile and send a short message to them via that.