Actinic has partnered with PayPal Website Payments Pro and are offering to waive setup costs (£49.99 +VAT) for their Actinic Express product. PayPal Website Payments Pro are already waiving monthly fees until July this year and Actinic’s offer runs alongside this. All you’ll pay until July is the £19.99 +VAT monthly Actinic charge along with PayPal processing fees.
This looks a really attractive offer for many eBayers as it’s an “out of the box” solution to set up your own ecommerce store to run in parallel with your eBay shop. Why carry on paying eBay fees when you can migrate buyers to your own website? We’d recommend shopping about though, and in fact there are many more cost effective solutions available than Actinic if you have a little HTML knowledge. osCommerce is a free to use open source solution, the advantage of Actinic is that you need very little prior knowledge and don’t even need your own web space to host your shop.
In the long term the £19.99 +VAT a month is a steep overhead compared to other solutions, with a years subscription costing £240 +VAT you could easily have a properly customised solution tailored to your exact requirements. We’d recommend some research of different solutions before signing up simply to save the setup cost. If you don’t have your own ecommerce site though, it’s a great incentive prompting you to consider your options.
