There’s an old saying that you have to spend money in order to make money – even online. Installation, hosting, set-up, and simply learning how to use a new system all act as drains on your time and wallet – but you can save time, at least, simply by using Actinic’s new hosting service, Express. For £20 a month you get a basic but perfectly competent online store that can hold your products, as well as hosting for images and customer data.

Your design options are limited to four templates, with customised colours and header images. Actinic Express follows a standard system, with products broken into categories, illustrated with an uploaded image and typed text. There are options to break up your product list with descriptive copy and integrate basic search engine optimisation keywords. Individual products offer a huge amount of control, with the option to allow only one of a product into a visitor’s shopping cart, assign both thumbnails and full-size images, and prompt the customer – for example, which colour chainsaw to send or what message to write on the box.

Behind the scenes, the system integrates with a number of payment gateways – currently PayPal, Protx and SecPay ATM – and offers access to an Actinic checkout as well. You’ll need to have a merchant account and PDQ machine to make use of this. It also holds all the usual important information, including company details, tax information, terms and conditions and shipping options.

Any orders are displayed when you log into your account, with one click on a small green icon clearing an order off the list and emailing the customer a confirmation note. The option’s a bit close to the Print button for our liking and there’s no dialog box to cancel an inadvertent click.

To customise your shop and fit it into an existing site you’ll need to look elsewhere: Express is about getting you ready to sell fast. Much of this is a matter of getting out of your way and giving you unlimited products rather than imposing an arbitrary limit, for a reasonable fee that should pay for itself within a couple of orders.