I have really found this forum very useful whilst researching a replacement cart for Actinic V9 as I could see nothing to tempt me to pay out for an upgrade to V10.

I eventually ended up with a choice between Interspire and CS Cart. The forth coming Interspire integration with Ebay was very tempting but Interspire pre-sales support was challenging as it appears that their UK telephone line is not manned. I also received conflicting information on the functionality of their voucher system. Whilst this protracted dialogue was going on, I thought I would contact CS Cart. Every question was answered promptly so after reading the manual and playing on the demo version, I have taking the plunge and bought CS Cart.

I just cannot get over the features it offers when compared to Actinic and all just for £192 (half the price of V9 to V10 upgrade).

I required some changes to the layout and as I was unfamiliar with the code, I asked CS Cart for a quotation to do the changes for me. Within a few hours, I was sent detailed instructions on how to mod things to get the look I was after and they continued to hold my hand throughout the day with support. One issue was beyond me so they carried out the mods remotely for me all as part of their 30 day inclusive support contract.

I have a busy period getting the new site ready for the end of this month but looking forward to using many of the new features.

What will we miss about Actinic - we liked the MOTO form, the way Actinic Payments was integrated and the way it handled back orders (once it was finally fixed). I'm sure there will be problems with CS Cart but as long as they continue to provide quality support they have managed so far, then I am quite relaxed about it even taking into account that they are based in Russia.

Hope my experience will be of use to others.

Paul
technobots.co.uk

Did you import the products? Did it go smoothly?

How did you handle the change in workflow (the lack of uploading and downloading and such)?

An Actinic to CS Cart transformation is of serious interest - with ISC V6 coming very soon, I am unsure whether to go for ISC V6 or the new CS Cart, which looks very good - so I have the same question as Gabe, did you transfer the products and how easy was it to do, if you did?
Orders and Repeat customers doubled within 6 weeks, even with some serious Google indexing issues which were actually my fault. That figure alone is enough to tell me Act.... has had its day and an 'online' site is the way forward with order tracking and customer accounts. The change in workflow was adapted to allow for more packing, printing, phoning, emailing and eating cheese 'n' bacon paninis

__________________
Conservatory Furniture
Cupar Garden Centre @ Twitter

Hi Guys,

I have yet to import the products, that's next week and I will let you know how it goes. I do not see a way of importing components but I have very few products affected so it is not an issue for me. I use a flat excel file for Actinic, paper catalogue program and our accounts package and it looks easy enough to use it for CS Cart. My biggest concern was importing the quantity discount pricing which affects over 3,000 products and they were manually entered into Actinic. Fortunately CS Cart has an import function for quantity pricing, it's not flat (needs a row for each price break for each product) but I have set up a sheet in excel that is linked to our main product pricing sheet that should handle this.

The focus remains in getting the layout right and understanding all of the features before importing our product base.

What I have found to be the biggest change is the minimal uploading needed for layout changes and the ability to maintain the site from any PC connected to the net which is great for working at home or getting a member of staff to work on the site from their PC. So far, the only uploading I have carried out is for changes to CSS files which I mod in notepad and ftp across which is no real hardship, all other changes are executed online.

CS Cart features that I am looking forward to using are customer accounts which also allow for members to request access to user groups which is great for us as we give model club members a discount. Order tracking and direct messaging to customers, product reviews, gift vouchers, improved shipping that allows a combination of weight and value, wish list, multiple currencies and languages and others. I have also found that the product description has a very useful visual HTML editor that allows for tables, bullets, special symbols, rules etc..

I'll post back with how I get on with the importing with a link to the new site when it is ready.

Paul

I feel that you have this the wrong way round.

Its my experience that ALL shops can be visually manipulated to look like anything. Even the most awkward template engine (read: Magento) can be teased into shape.

Your primary concern should be your products. Their data and the permutations. Showing the pickers and packers the interface so they can adjust to the new workflow is a priority too. Switchover day will be complicated if they don't know it.

I find the main concern are the above points. Particularly retaining any meta-data such as discounts and permutations. I've yet to import the permutations in actinic into *anything* else.

In most cases for me, the handling of the products and orders is the reason for choosing a particular cart. I find the visual aspect, secondary.

You may well be right but the challenge for me is the look of the shop as that is my weakest area. Looking at the CS Cart fields that can be imported, I do not expect any problems (not hold me to that), even the description can include html formatting.

Presentation of products will be improved as their is an integral tab layout. We have over 500 pdf and zip files associated with products which can be managed direct within CS Cart. We have very few products with permuations and will be no hardship to manually enter those in.

The product import fields are

* Product code
* Category
* List price
* Price
* Status
* Quantity
* Weight
* Min quantity
* Shipping freight
* Date added
* Downloadable

* Files
* Ship downloadable
* Inventory tracking
* Free shipping
* Feature comparison
* Zero price action
* Thumbnail
* Detailed image
* Product name
* Description
* Short description

* Meta keywords
* Meta description
* Search words
* Page title
* Taxes
* Localizations
* Features
* Options
* Secondary categories
* Product URL
* Image URL

Then there is other imports for images, quantity discounting, language translations, country states & users. Nothing that I can see for permuations yet.

As for the interface for the pickers, quite right and my first impressions are that it is not as good as Actinic but that may be simply because of the different approach in CS Cart and my lack of experience with it. I did look at plenty of packages and some were a complete turn off for the end user interface, ultimately the decision was taken simply because I had a 'good feel' about CS Cart. Ultimately, there will some pains but as long as they are sufficiently outweighed by the gains then I will be happy. Just being able to have customers check progress of their orders on-line without the need to phone us is one such gain. Our database in Actinic is over 200MB compacted so it's a reasonably large site and maintaining it gets slower every day as we add new products, so I am hoping (praying in fact) that in CS Cart it will be quicker to maintain.

i might get a copy and try to create an importer.

fun-fun-fun.

Hi Gabriel,

A quick update on the importing:

Importing the product csv file initially failed due to the size of it, CSC changed the memory limits in a PHP file for us and it then uploaded fine.

Unable to find a way to import category info such as images / descriptions which is a pain as we have 500+ categories.

I took the descriptions from an Actinic export and stripped out the !!< & >!!, replaced the /n with <br> and /n/n with <p> using open office as excel could not handle the number of characters in the cell. The descriptions then imported reasonable cleanly into CSC.

Imported the quantity price breaks okay, also all images and additional images imported fine.

We have 600 datasheets that can be opened from links within the Actinic descriptions, in CSC these are configured as attachments in their own tab which is rather nice. So had to strip out the code from the descriptions and manually add these one at a time through the CSC admin interface. Took some time but easier to maintain from now on.

So it is taking shape and CSC continue to provide a quick response to support tickets even doing a layout change direct onto our server.

There are two import fields for Features and Options which may be suitable for permuations but not tried them out yet.

Coming across some annoyances like a lack of global changes i.e. using the Review addon for Q & A but once installed, you have to enable it per product. With 5,000 products it takes some time as the maximum number of items you can globally modify is limited to 100.

CSC has a rather handy built in Form builder so no need to use Machform this time.

Importing our flat spreadsheet into Actininc and then updating takes typically 45 minutes. Importing the same sheet into CSC and it updating products automatically takes about 10 minutes so maintenance should be a lot quicker.

I'm sure this could be done with a little bit of sql trickery if you knew the field that controlled the on/off setting.

__________________
Edinburgh Photoblog
Twitter

Hi Dave,

You are quite right. I did find a post on the CSC forum where you can do a search and replace direct on the database. I did try but it did not work for me but that is probably because I was completely out of my depth and decided to play safe and do it the long way.