Avactis Hosting: Compare Hosting

What is Avactis?

Avactis is shopping cart software for e-commerce websites. It allows integration of a shopping cart into your existing website, so you don’t have worry about site migration or downtime when creating an e-commerce component to your company site.

It’s a script installation compatible with Softaculous, and in many instances, it’s a one-click installation from your control panel.

It offers a WordPress plug-in for seamless integration with your existing site, as well as a Joomla extension. Installation is fairly straightforward, and templates and add-ons are easy to integrate and available with both the free or premium versions.

Features

Avactis offers a large list of extensions, templates, themes, more than 50 payment methods, search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing tools, social media integration, and more. You can add functionality, such as a Facebook storefront or mobile site skin, for a fee, and all extensions from Avactis are plug and play.

The available marketing tools within Avactis include email newsletter management, discount codes, affiliate code tracking, and customer grouping. You’ll get full data backup and restore, plus support for hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) and secure sockets layer (SSL). This keeps your data and transactions safe from attack or disaster. Meta tag support, SEO-friendly cart URLs, page titles, keywords, and optimized hypertext markup language (HTML) round out the SEO options included with Avactis.

Avactis offers mobile-ready themes and extensions for phones and tables, as well as a mobile-accessible admin panel for updating on the go. For an additional fee, they also offer an optimized mobile app which features integration with your Avactis store, Android and iOS support, push notifications, unlimited app downloads and mobile site visits, and free upgrades.

Premium extensions are also available either as part of a paid plan or individually priced with the free plan. These allow you to enhance your customer experience with price filters, a sale category, new items list, site maps, and more.

Why Choose Avactis?

Avactis provides a secure, easy solution to most eCommerce needs. It uses minimal server resources, so you don’t need to invest in a high-cost hosting plan, yet includes a robust selection of features and PCI compliance to protect your customer data.

Out of the box, Avactis offers a full-featured eCommerce store with the most commonly used cart features, including support for most popular shipping services, Facebook page coupons, subscription options, discount and gift certificates, and an abandoned cart saver.

If you’re looking for a more customized site, you (or your favorite PHP developer) can modify your installation to suit your business needs. Or if you don’t have a PHP developer at your disposal, Avactis also offers custom development. You can request an estimate on their website.

There are also advanced features available, such as multiple storefront and even multi-vendor marketplace support. For multiple store fronts, you’ll need to visit their support pages and add a few lines of custom code, but the steps are fairly straightforward and shouldn’t be too hard even for a relative novice. If you’re considering a multi-vendor marketplace, you’ll need to contact their sales team for pricing.

Avactis Pricing Plan

Avactis offers three pricing plans. The free plan includes all the essentials — core extensions, themes, documentation, and video support — and allows you to add additional features at a per-item cost. The professional plan adds multi-language stores, premium extensions, one year of their mobile app, and premium support. The premium plan includes everything in the professional plan, but adds an extra year of the mobile app and additional support credits.

You can also add the mobile app or support credits separately, but make sure you compare the add-on price versus the professional/premium plans. If you want both, one of the paid plans could save you quite a bit.

If you don’t want to host your storefront yourself, they also offer three options for cloud hosting. For these, storage space, bandwidth, and number of products you’ll list are important variables. Choose the best plan for your company based on how much space and traffic the site requires, as well as how much tech support you’ll need.

Why Choose Avactis?

Avactis offers a number of conveniences, including:

• A complete system that is easy to set up and maintain
• An intuitive interface
• Support for most hosting services
• Integrated newsletter option to keep in touch with customers
• A free option that includes all the essentials

On the other hand, some things you may want to consider are:

• Premium support (anything beyond the online documentation and forums) requires you to purchase support credits or a premium plan
• Unless you pay for their highest-price mobile app solution, your store’s app will be Avactis-branded
• Depending on the look and feel you’re going for, you may need to do extensive customization. As with any themed application, it’s a good idea to shop around and find a service that provides the look you desire (or at least the closest to it), before you invest any money

Alternative Solutions

When choosing a shopping cart solution for your store, make sure to pick a system that is actively maintained and provides the highest level of security, both for you and your customers. Some alternatives include:

CubeCart provides many of the same features as Avactis, but adds a robust set of reporting features to help you track sales data from a variety of perspectives. This is particularly useful for optimizing your site, content, and advertising.

Pinnacle Cart is a hosted solution that offers many similar features to Avactis, including easy integration with your existing site, PCI compliance, free themes, and custom development. They offer a variety of monthly payment options, as well as a free trial.

Like Avactis, both of these options are complete store solutions. Another option would be to create the storefront yourself, either using a template for your content management system (WordPress, Joomla, etc.) or a custom development, and leave the billing to someone else, such as PayPal or Google Checkout.

There a many advantages to these services, including availability through most web hosts, support for most content management systems, name recognition for your buyers, a highly-supported and maintained payment system, and the highest level of data security. Additionally, all of your customers’ payments will be handled by the third party, not you, which means you don’t have to worry about the potential consequences, should your site get breached. On the other hand, these services limit the payment options you can accept and can add considerably to your monthly transaction fees.

Server Requirements

Avactis will work with most hosting plans, but you should check with your web host just in case.

Avactis is built around PHP technology and uses MySQL to store information, so it should run any web server with PHP version 5.3 or higher and MySQL database server version 4.0.2 or higher. You’ll also need at least 35 MB of disk space for the shopping card and anywhere from 5 MB to 100 MB for the database. Of course, the more images you add, the higher the disk space it will require.

Optional, but recommended, requirements include HTTPS for some payment methods, Secure Shell access or Cron job management for backup and restore, and Apache mod_rewrite for SEO URLs support.