Oxatis Reviews 15

I can prove I have been Oxatis from before they changed from Actinic to Oxatis.

I won't list all the reasons they are the worst company to deal with, only the most recent.

1. Messaged to cancel account
2. Billed me £104.00
3. Person on holiday would call when they returned
4. No one called
5. Billed me £104.00
6. No one called
7. Finally got a reply, around a month after my initial request to cancel my subscription and INCONCEIVABLY for a tech company received the following message:

Please note that to unsubscribe, you must send a registered letter to New Oxatis at 144 rue d'Odin - 34000 Montpellier, which will allow your cancellation request to be taken into account.
Best regards
Technical Service Oxatis

Everything to do with a tech company is OBVIOUSLY done online - except closing your account where you have to start sending registered letters overseas!

OK, one last thing, I once paid nearly £3000 for SEO and as a result, they put spelling mistakes on my live home page! Needless to say, the expensive SEO resulted in no additional traffic or sales. What can you expect from a company that can't even be bothered to use a spellchecker?

I am so disappointed that after spending TENS of thousands of pounds with this company, I couldn't even get a call from my nameless, faceless account manager... and all they can do is ask I start posting letters overseas... for them to "consider" stopping billing me!?!

I hope someone reads this and stops billing me, I just want my emails off your server, my website is no longer on Oxatis, so surely I can be assisted to leave, get my emails and refund the £104.00 you took only 5 days ago, a month after I first was ignored.

Do that and I will happily delete this review. You have treated me appallingly over the years and it is the least you could do.

They have just taken out £5,000 for no reason, without warning and without authorisation!! As they extracted the monies late on Friday evening, we cannot get hold of anyone to assist us, either in the UK or France! The stress is exponential!! Can anyone help us with an emergency contact number? Of course we have spoken to our bank, but the money has gone. We have been good customers for more than 10 years and this is how they treat us!!!

Was with the company for over 10 years with 2 websites. The product is now dated in my opinion. After a recent 400%+ monthly cost increase I decided to leave. The cost increase was basically take it or leave it. I also don't rate the current customer account management. Technical support has always be very good. I have now moved to a new provider and am paying substantially less for a better product and amazing support.

The worst - once you are locked in with them it's endless charges for even the most basic and commonplace add-ons. Dataplug doesn't work, images aren't automatically resized, the shopping cart experience is endless putting off 77% of shoppers and tech support are perpetually out of the office. Worse still, if you don't buy their overpriced services you will be given the cold shoulder and penalised. Their tactics seem to be taken from the mob handbook for running a racket
I could go on and on and on but instead I will just say... Avoid this company at all costs. If you are already with them, shop around and you will realise quickly that there are far better options out there.

We've had our website operating with Oxatis for around 4 years now. In fact, we're just in the process of building a second site with them. We've found them to be informative, approachable, hands on involved and delivered what we wanted from a site. The after sales service is great. They resolve all of our Google shopping, google ads, SEO and get us ranked in the very top of the google pages that are frequently searched.
Nothing is without misunderstandings and I sometimes think "I know best" but to be honest, they are the experts so I let them do what they do best. We've hit the targets we set with their help. If you're looking for a dedicated website design company that do not cost the earth yet have the full back up of sales and technical, choose Oxatis. We deal with Andy Porter on the sales and general questions and Mathilde who does wonders with our SEO and Google work.
I'd recommend Oxatis.

We have used Oxatis for a number of years now, our online business has grown from strength to strength and has now become our largest single account at the highest margin. The website has continued to be developed with minor upgrades at regular intervals that have improved our customer experience. I have often talked to our competition who have spent significantly more on websites than what we pay from Oxatis with no better results. We are a £20m business the service we get from our main point of contact is excellent, he understands our business and works with us to ensure the best results. Very rarely do we have any issues and if we do they are sorted quickly without fuss and often without charge. We have commissioned them to do an integration into our new point of sale software and a refresh of the website, which will I am sure continue to improve our sales going forward.

This company is a shame. They're continuing spamming my mail. This kind of company should not be able to make business anywhere in the world...

Took over two and a half years to sort our SSL certification.
Missold at the start as we were told our Sage software would interface. Cost over £1000 to upgrade.
The Data Plug has never worked properly!!
We were without the Data Plug for 3 months at the end of 2016 as Sage updated software and it no longer worked.
Continually complained to the tech team that the Data Plug was not updating properly. So far no resolution.
The Data Plug has not been working for us since February 2019.
Blamed Sage who told us there should be no problem
No answer from the UK office!! I have asked if it has been closed, not received a reply.

MIssold SEO functionality as there is non.
Then they wand £150 per month to do it

I could go on!!!!!!

unable to cancel my subscription !
cancelled and confirmed as cancelled but still receiving invoices and money still being taken from my account. Not acceptable.

When you eventually sorted out my issue you did it well and helpfully, however to get to that stage was a lengthy and time consuming process.
Perhaps the best indicator is that you finally replied to this comment almost a year later.

Hi,

Was chasing me nearly everyday to sign up
We signed up and waited over three months to get our website up now it is up they promised many features drop down menu's and other options to add but non were done. Customer service is bad never in the office.

Do not go with them absolutely rubbish service they look good but then again that is their job other then that speed, service, customer care, functionality is not good at all.

Want a refund but will not issue one.

We have been very satisfied with the look and functionality of our Actinic website as an online store. It took quite some time to set it up by using one of the preset templates; it was frustrating at times but given the overall cost we feel it represents good value. The additional add on aps usually have a cost associated but at least you are in control of what to choose and how much to spend. Technical assistance is available although usually next day; the online tutorials are a very helpful back up.

With reference to the UK arm in 2016-17, Actinic UK (Actinic.co.uk)...16 months of rubbish:

I ran through at length, over the phone and in writing, some very specific needs regarding some unusual VAT handling in my business (UK Mobility supplier). I was promised by 3 members of staff, including my "Senior Sales Consultant" that this functionality could be added in; conveniently for them, only ever in phone conversations, not in writing.
With this assurance, they relieved me of £5-6000 + VAT up front for design, data transfers form our old site, launch, SEO and subscription, then proceeded to be very slow at any development. After 5 months of to-and-fro between me, Actinic UK, and Oxatis in France, the design was not exactly to requirements but adequate. Then it started...

Several requests for extra money for extra features. Some I paid, others I rejected, such as £800 + VAT up front for URL re-directs from our old site.
I made one last verification that our VAT requirements were being addressed, since I could find no evidence in the site back office....Oh dear, can't do it after all! Sorry. They even claimed that I had never spoken to them about our VAT needs, despite showing them several archived emails and responses referring to the requirements.
They also refuse to check telephone conversation recordings, which I know they make, to verify my claim.

Understandably annoyed, I asked for a partial refund. I offered to pay for the design work which had been carried out, and they refund me the payments for work not yet done or scheduled...no dice.
I asked to speak to my contact's line manager....no dice.
I was just pointed towards their Terms and Conditions (hidden in the site map links at the foot of their pages, which had never been given or linked to up till then)....No refunds, ever, for advance payments!
I was never given the option of not making advance payments.
This amounts to extortion...they could take the money even if they did absolutely nothing for it!

So far, they seem to be a complete bunch of shysters....and that's being nice.

Great Ecommerce Software ... I've used desktop based ecommerce software since 1999 but we found that the amount of products was slowing the software down. Moving forward we needed a cloud based solution that was both fast in terms of page loading and also easy to transfer data to and we chose Actinic for our own B to B requirements although the software works great for both B to C and B to B
Using the Dataplug facility it's relatively easy to get data from a spreadsheet to the software although as with any project like this it pay to plan ahead before you dive in with the upload.

This is software which is adaptable and you need to take time get things right ... I have to be honest and say that I have not experienced the problems mentioned in other reviews and have done each of those processes many times. Yes ... some of the elements are more complex than others but this is always going to be the case with software which has enhanced features such as options. I found myself using the knowledge base / help pages quite a bit and they were very clear.

Orders can be printed easily or if you have an order processing package such as Exact (which we use) you can use the free Dataplug software (again) to download orders either manually or at scheduled intervals.

We have developed an interface which takes the orders in spreadsheet format and prepares them for Exact - (very easy to do). So no matter how many orders and how big they are, it takes pretty much the same time to load into your order processing / account software saving hours of keying.
In the time that we've been live with the Cloud based system there's been no issues and what is noticeable is that our order size has increased significantly. Customers tell us that speed and ease of use are good since we moved to Actinic so we think this is the reason for the increase.

As a start-up clothing business, we chose Actinic (Oxatis) as a platform for what appeared to be all the right reasons. However, several months into the process, it became clear that the platform simply does not work - confirmed by their own support.

Some of the issues were as follows:
- No ability to add banners / adverts to either desktop or mobile site. Black Friday came and went - no way of telling our customers we had a sale on!
- Products constantly display as Out of Stock if the default option is out of stock. Imagine one shirt that has 5 different sizes and 4 different colours. 20 options. You could have stock of 19 of those options, but if no 20 happened to be the default, everything shows out of stock.
- Mobile site is not a full site - its a cut down, un-customisable version of a catalogue. No Blog / additional pages etc. They can't even appear on the menu with a link to the desktop version.
- Dataplug (Their tool to integrate into back-office). Sends address information incorrectly, so every address had to be amended in the back office. Orders and order lines were duplicated - in some instances a £40 order came into the back office for over £260 value. Items that have a zero stock in the back office - online stock levels are not adjusted.

The list goes on and on.

On top of all this I was relieved of £1000 for site development, none of which was delivered by the time we left for another platform. Did they refund the money? Nope....

If you are looking for a web shop platform, look elsewhere.....

It was not apparent to me during the trial period that this fundamental ability to edit the layout of the details page was not available. This is especially the case given the ability to edit other key elements of the site structure such as web pages, headers and product item layouts. I discovered this flaw a day after subscribing. They promise a "drag and drop editor" and then point you towards their designers who can do it for you at a cost. I also found the documentation very difficult to follow which I suspect is due to a combination of translation anomalies and poor documentation (which I have since seen has been alluded to in other professional reviews). When I requested a refund (after 2 days) was told that it is against their policy. Now awaiting their formal response. If anyone else is in the same position and you want to cancel a contract for services made over the phone or online, you have rights under the Consumer Contracts Regulations.