Of the six products reviewed here, four stand out as being of particular interest. Actinic, for example, is an ideal tool for creating a one-off Web shop, with as little design skills as possible required. Shipping and tax handling are excellent and should cater for most situations.

For the developer, ecBuilder should be a real consideration. If you do need to build several shops, the licensing structure works out a lot cheaper than buying multiple copies of Actinic. Tax and shipping options are not extensive though, so look at these carefully.

AccessweB is no doubt the route to go if you really want to get into end-to-end e-commerce, but the costs will rise as you start to add accounting modules via the Access Accounting route. Even so, the software is still far more economical than its nearest competition in this field, particularly if you want B2B features.

Erol 2 is the most accomplished all-rounder, particularly when it comes to layout and design. But this can make the development process a longer job all told. Shipping and tax are the best by far, with a great deal of thought having gone into just what makes for a logical checkout phase.

Store4WEB has the advantage of being very simple and extremely cost effective, especially if you just want to have a go and see what happens. eGenie, on the other hand, is a little too expensive to justify the basic features on offer, although it is extremely simple to use.