Installation and options

SellerDeck is the new name for Actinic Desktop, an e-commerce package with more than 16 years heritage, and one of the few remaining not to have moved fully to the cloud.

Unlike many an e-commerce package, SellerDeck 2013 loads on to a PC and once you’re happy with the solution, you then upload the settings to the web; either to your own servers, an internet host that supports SellerDeck, or to its own hosting service.

The benefit of this hybrid offline system is you can tweak and retweak your website without the need for a web connection, and without disturbing the live system. In the past this was a real benefit, but with 4G and the internet available nearly everywhere the benefits are no longer significant. However, if you want to design your site mid-Atlantic and have the options of self-hosting then SellerDeck 2013 is your best solution.

Installing the software is a straightforward procedure and takes just a few minutes to complete. A nice touch on the installation is that SellerDeck 2013 installs independently to any previous versions, so you’re not immediately thrown into the new version. Additionally the service can be installed on your own website or using SellerDeck’s Trial Hosting service and can be swapped over at a later date should you change your mind.

Once installed you then have a wealth of different options that fit into three separate categories, products, site design and business settings.

The Business Settings part of SellerDeck gives you a bewildering number of choices to define the way your ecommerce system behaves, to you and the customer. It allows you to alter your sites payment and security methods, decide what tax is paid, create terms and conditions pages, create and edit discounts and payment methods, and alter the back-end order processing details.

There are hundreds of different options available and you can tweak the site to a degree that you’ll never get on any of the mainstream cloud solutions. Although most of this part of the product was straightforward and simple to use, there were some categories that weren’t easily understood, and many options that were inexplicably greyed out, and we found it wasn’t always immediately obvious how to find out why this was.

Design and features

The site design part of SellerDeck has three elements you can either use the built-in wizard, which gives you the ability to change some of the design basics, use the Dreamweaver plug-in to do the design outside of SellerDeck, or you can open up the hood and alter the underlying HTML. This is an option that should only really be attempted by design experts – luckily because of the package’s lengthy heritage it’s easy to find designers who know their way around the system and there are additionally plenty of off-the-peg designs available.

Finally, the product side of the package offers a similar number of functions and features to the Business Settings, and it’s in this section where SellerDeck has concentrated most of the new features to SellerDeck 2013.

New features for this version of the package include a long awaited ability for users to be able to filter items on the website via categories, so users can filter down large lists to see only see products of a certain colour, a certain brand, or a certain size etc. While this sounds a great feature, it’s something that many portal based solutions have had for some time and most customers, particularly in the IT and clothing sectors, have been using for some time.

The filter works in two ways; users can filter the results of searches or on sections using a number of pre-selected criteria, or it can be used to allow new sections to be created on the website based on a set of criteria. For example on a sports goods site, shoppers would be able to search for footballs, then set a filter to see only those by Nike and that were red in colour. The site owner could create an ad-hoc section that just featured products made by Nike, something that would have taken a significant amount of time in previous versions.

The filter solution in SellerDeck works well, and while it’s not simple to set up it’s something you are only likely to do once or twice a year, so that shouldn’t be a cause for concern.

Another long awaited feature is the ability to do dynamic pricing, so prices can be automatically updated based on what options a customer selects. For example, a sofa would change price based on the fabric in which it is covered.

Other significant new features in SellerDeck include the ability to do automatic splitting of long store sections into multiple pages, and new search features including the ability to produce automatic suggestions as the customer types, and the ability for customers to sort the search results themselves, plus new HTML versions of sales confirmation emails.

Verdict

Ten years ago SellerDeck was one of the best pieces of e-commerce software on the market, but the rise of portal based packages with their ability to update features and functions on the fly had begun to make it look a little long in the tooth in some respects.

However, this new version brings SellerDeck back into the game, and offers a package that provides an immense number of features and functions that should give it a serious boost in the market.