Probably one of the best-known offline PC-based shop builders, Actinic Catalog is a good place to start whether you are a developer or an end user.

Look and feel is based around a tree-like display, showing shop departments with products as branches. You simply complete the various forms and dialogs and Actinic produces the finished Web site based on your data entry. Output is plain HTML, and is uploaded to the host of your choice.

Actinic offers plenty of pre-designed themes and you can change fonts, text colour and background design as well. Developers can edit templates if desired, but this is not an easy job.

The product catalogue is comprehensive, featuring plenty of room for item details - including options to cater for 'colour' and 'size' variations. Actinic handles tax and shipping well too, offering the appropriate amount to be charged according to the location of the customer. You can allow for tax exception situations and even charge delivery VAT on a pro rata basis (very EU friendly!).

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Payments can be handled as 'cash on delivery', 'cheque on delivery' and so on, plus you can accept credit cards with online authorisation gateways to WorldPay, Netbanx and Datacash, among others. You also get a full order processing system included, catering for back-orders and stock quantity monitoring, and you can suspend customer ordering for out of stock products.