Late to the Party

acompton

Well, I've finally done it. I've ditched the trusty V7 for a new Interspire site. It's been a long time coming and a bumpty ride.

So far, I'm very impressed with the features and the UI. Even she-who-runs-the-shop has been modifying products with very little training and has described the interface as 'very intuitive'. Mind you, she's had years of wrestling with Amazon's front end.

Ironically, on the day I went live, I got an Actinic marketing email.

wesleythorne

Hi, congratulations, our interspire site has been up for about a month and sales are booming. So much quicker to use and update.

Got our v11 actinic license as we had paid for support but I cant see us doing anything with it !

traceyhand

Are you using Interspire (self-hosted) or BigCommerce, Alan?

Just curious really

acompton

Interspire self-hosted (although no actually managing the hosting myself, if you know what I mean).
Deffo not Big Commerce

traceyhand

you say "deffo not" as if Big Commerce would be a bad thing?

We've been using ISC for nearly 10 months now and haven't regretted it for a second.

Threat of death wouldn't lure Nick back to using Actinic nowadays!

acompton

No, it wasn't a signifcant comment. Just indicating that I believe I have self-hosted, even though I wasn't quite sure what you meant (by self-hosted).

traceyhand

oh right, I see what you mean.

yeh, I didn't really mean "self"-hosted so much as hosted for us rather than Big commerce's way

acompton

One question: in the Order Status options, what do people do with the 'Completed' option?

Also: I had a sales call from Actinic on Friday. Do they know? or is it because I unsubcribed from the sales newsletter?

GrantG

The order status 'Completed' should be the next step from Shipped, when the order is actually delivered. Not a major deal - the Statistics still take into account Shipped and Completed as being one and the same.

This wouldn't surprise me, although I would believe it's probably the latter due to knowing an Actinic user having an active online store live for 3+ years using the Actinic trial combined with one of the most common, widely exploited Windows hacks and yet, they've never requested he/she buys a license. They must surely know the store is online and actively being updated, since, if some clever cloggs managed to exploit one of the CGI scripts to extract every Actinic store e-mail address, it wouldn't take much to find other exploits or callbacks.

How are you finding Interspire, much more intuitive, quicker and easier to maintain your store than with Actinic? That's what most users, technophobes and tech geeks alike have said to me.

acompton

Yes, I am finding it intuitive (see post #1) and flexible. I am often surprised by the well-thought-out error messages - usually the weakest point of many software packages. I keep finding new options to play with. One of the main reasons for upgrading was to make it easier to maintain the store. Some regular tasks had become very tedious with Actinic, and updating the site was taking forever.

traceyhand

Same reasons as we changed, Alan.

A simple upload would take over 2 hours and we couldn't even DO a refresh!

Plus single page upload didn't work for us (it'd result in a blank page for the product/page uploaded)

Actinic was dead in the water as far as Jesters was concerned.

I'm willing to consider it (well, online version) for our off-shoot site but it will have to earn it. I'm not going to choose it just for loyalty's sake.

It's too expensive for this project, I think, which is why I'm looking elsewhere.

I do love Interspire. I'm sad to see its demise although we may, in time, consider switching to Big Commerce....maybe (if ISC really starts falling behind)

wesleythorne

ISC is much quicker for admin, over the weekend I did a weeks worth of actinic messing about on a Sunday morning.

The banners feature is very good and has lots of potential.

Only problem I now have is this increased traffic is making our site load very slowy at certain times of day. We are currently hosted on a shared server.

Looking for something that will suit us but there seems a lot of options. We use about 20GB of traffic a month with 1000 products.
Most of our products has 2 product variations.

Looking a a VPS solution but not sure how much RAM we would need, different hosting companies have told me I need anywhere from 256mb to 2gb.

Any ideas ?

Dave Fisher

Wesley, If you are looking for a good hosting company with excellent support I can highly recommend VidaHost https://www.vidahost.com/servers/overview/virtual-dedicated 

Their Magento VDS @ £69 will run most shopping carts at excellent speeds including Magento which we evaluated once.

traceyhand

Who are you currently hosted with, Wesley?

I can massively recommend NuBlue.

http://www.nublue.co.uk/web-hosting/vps

We have their VPS hosting (VPS10) and their support has been excellent every time we've used it.

acompton

Two more numpty questions:

Quote: The order status 'Completed' should be the next step from Shipped, when the order is actually delivered

1. Does that mean that the customer will get a 'change of status' email?

2. Is there any way to edit the Invoice/Packing List templates? I've looked through the Knowledgebase articles and can't find anything.

wesleythorne

Hi, have spoken to nublue, one of my options, might try out there 30 day trial.

1. Does that mean that the customer will get a 'change of status' email?
You can control the emails that get sent out in admin/checkout settings / order settings

wes

wesleythorne

Hi Tracey, regarding vps, we have not used before, do you have spam filters, firewalls on your vps.
trying to find out what is involved with a vps and how many 'extras' we may need to install / pay for.
The nublue vps10 gives 384mb of ran, would this be enough for our product variations,

Kind Regards
Wesley

traceyhand

We have no problems with the VPS10 ram and our variations.

Re. extras, we don't pay for any!

Give NuBlue a call (or email), they'll answer any pre-sales queries you have.

Their support is exceptionally good. They've gone "Above and beyond" many times since we moved to them in January.

traceyhand

acompton said:
Two more numpty questions:

Quote: The order status 'Completed' should be the next step from Shipped, when the order is actually delivered

1. Does that mean that the customer will get a 'change of status' email?
You can set when these are sent by checking Checkout Settings > General Settings > Order Settings > Customer Email Notifications

2. Is there any way to edit the Invoice/Packing List templates? I've looked through the Knowledgebase articles and can't find anything.
Store Design > Emails
You can manage all the html email templates from here

They're not numpty questions, Alan. I still spent a lot of time hunting down settings that I know I've seen before and can't re-find! There are so many settings that it's easy to forget where you saw them!

wesleythorne

is it best to use SSL on the admin side of ISC, doe sanyone run there admin backend without SSL ?

acompton

@Tracey: Thank you for the detailed reply and the vote of confidence. Actually I was wanting to edit the Invoice and Packing List templates. The Interspire forum has some mention off this. I'm surprised it isn't easier.

I've been offline for 5 days doing a stock take and scanning in all the bar codes (:|

I'm hoping to use the bar codes to make stock-taking easier in future.

traceyhand

acompton said:
@Tracey: Thank you for the detailed reply and the vote of confidence. Actually I was wanting to edit the Invoice and Packing List templates. The Interspire forum has some mention off this. I'm surprised it isn't easier.

My mistake. I read invoice and packing list but brain translated as emails LOL

If you go to Store Design > Browse Template Files, I think the reports are in there

We don't use the ISC reports (we export to 1StopOrders) so I've never edited them but I'm fairly sure that's where they are.

acompton

We used to use the Actinic highlight colour to indicate overseas orders. Now we get a little country flag to do the job for us. But why do some of them have a pink background area? Suspect commies ? :D

wesleythorne

we use 1stoporderprocessing for our isc and amazon sales.
You can use the highlight colour like you could in actinic for labelling jobs with colours
Also 1stop has a good address formatting if you are using packing slips as address labels with document wallets.

We also like the shelf no/location you can allocate to products which is a plus.
Thumbs up from us!

GrantG

The highlighted flags (with pink background) is another tool to prevent fraudulent orders. The store captures the IP address, if the Billing Address does not relate back to the country of origin of the IP address, you will get the flag for the IP's country, highlighted in pink.

Although it is a good idea and the more fraud preventions, the better, you'll find most of the time you do see a flag, it will be the German flag for UK based orders - must be down to the customers ISP.

acompton

I did look at onestopprders a while ago. Does it still make you request download order reports on Amazon and then read them into OSO?

wesleythorne

> I did look at onestopprders a while ago. Does it still make you request
download order reports on Amazon and then read them into OSO?

it does, its easy though, log in to amazon, request report. download.
Import report in 1stop
auto print invoices and packing slips / ship orders

We mainly use the amazon import function , through 1stop we can use bin numbers / shelf locations. Amazon does not have any inbuilt function for locating stock in a warehouse. With 1000 products it is a pig with amazon, We did originally set up amazon to show our shelf numbers next to the SKU field as advised by amazon when we started selling with them. They did not tell us that if we want to change the SKU field you cant which. It is set in stone . This meant we could not move stock on to another shelf without amazon giving us the wrong shelf locations. With one stop it is easy to keep the 2 separate

Well worth a look and they do a 40 day free trial. Its not all singing intergration with amazon buy they are working on better intergration for a future update.

To be fair Actinic SAAS has excellent amazon intergration.

wesleythorne

singing 1stop praise again, i should get commisions

1 stop also allows you to export your data to several courier files, for us this means we can export 50 or 60 jobs straight into our couriers booking system, we don't have to re-key postcodes and address etc by hand. Takes 5 minutes for us to print 50 courier labels. Before it would take about 2 hours.

big step forward for us.

acompton

>it does, its easy though, log in to amazon, request report. download. Import report in 1stop auto print invoices and packing slips / ship orders

You haven't seen my home-grown equivalent of OSO - it uses Amazon Merchant Web Services. One click downloads the orders. Another uploads the 'shipped' status. Doesn't manage stock or integrate with Interspire (yet). I'm working on a php version to do that.

Gabriel Crowe

I want to see it. ;)

acompton

Recognise the upload/download/email buttons?

acompton

And here's the web version I'm developing:

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