10 Reasons Why I Prefer the Miva Merchant Shopping Cart
I have been working with Miva Merchant for over seven years as a user, a consultant, and now as owner of MerchantTutorials.com, a Miva Merchant Flash Video Tutorial site and Miva Merchant Educational Partner. Why do I prefer Miva Merchant over other shopping carts, especially when some carts are “free?” Here are my 10 reasons:
- With hundreds of third party modules available (usually for $20 to $100), adding functionality is extremely easy. Alternatively, most platforms, especially open source, require custom programming or, worse, have free open source add-ons that are not supported well.
- Miva Merchant can be hosted with any of dozens of hosts who specialize in Miva Merchant. Many platforms require you to host with the company itself, reducing your options and leverage for support. Additionally, if you’re hosted with a shopping cart company, and they die, your store is gone forever. All good Miva Merchant hosts will move your site to their servers at no charge.
- Miva Merchant is one of only a few platforms who are investing the hundreds of thousands of dollars to be PCI PA-DSS Compliant by the July 2010 deadline. Any platform that is not compliant will not be able to (legally) accept credit cards after that deadline. Many shopping carts, especially open source, will have to close up the deadline. http://www.tophosts.com/articles/009189.html
- Miva Merchant 5.5 is based on MySQL, which is much better than the dBase database format of version 4. It allows unlimited numbers of products, categories, customers, etc., without a loss of site speed. Sites on Miva Merchant 5.5 are significantly faster than the prior version.
- Most other platforms are written in PHP. This commonality has made PHP applications a target for hackers. All PHP applications, like Wordpress, need updates constantly. Usually a security flaw is discovered only after hundreds or thousands of sites are compromised. Miva Merchant is written in their proprietary language (MivaScript), and then compiled so nobody can see the source code. I have not heard of a single security vulnerability with Miva Merchant 5.5.
- Done right, Miva Merchant can be easily understood from one developer to the next. So, if something happened to your site developer, you could find someone else in the industry who can get in and, within an hour or two, know everything about your site’s setup. With most other platforms, there would be so much custom functionality you’re pretty much forced to use the same developer, and it’s expensive to pay a new developer to reverse engineer his code.
- Some carts actually charge a percentage of all sales, leading often to hundreds or thousands of dollars a month in fees. This is especially true of Yahoo Stores and Amazon. With Miva Merchant, you can lease your license through a Miva Merchant expert host usually for less than $10 a month when you host with them.
- Miva Merchant has a dynamic user and developer community that is willing to help with almost any question at the user forums and/or directly. I learned all I needed about Miva Merchant from other users (since my tutorials were not available), so I contribute back as much as I can on the forums. Competing developers, hosts and consultants are very cordial to each other, unlike any other community I’ve seen. This makes the annual Miva Merchant user conference as enjoyable as any conference I’ve ever been to.
- Once you get used to it, Miva Merchant is extremely easy to manage. Check out this video tour of the Miva Merchant administrative area I created to help you see how quickly you could be up to speed.
- Miva Merchant is extremely flexible. It defaults to a base structure – header, footer, left column navigation, content section, navigation bar…
But you are not stuck with that structure like most carts. There is simply no limit to how you can customize your store with Miva Merchant. Check out the Miva Merchant Store Galleria and you’ll see what I mean. If you are not a designer, you can purchase one of dozens of Miva Merchant skins to get your foundation quickly, and be online with minimal work.
Check out my Miva Merchant page on this blog and get your free Miva Merchant 5.5 Cheat Sheet.
Do you have reasons I haven’t listed, or even reasons you don’t like Miva Merchant?
7:39 am on October 6th, 2009
I agree almost completely! I’m a little iffy on #5 as it is essentially “security for obscurity”. Use of a compiled proprietary language does not guarantee a secure app, and I have seen some third party modules introduce XSS vulnerabilities.
I think it is fair to say that Miva Merchant is a secure and well maintained platform though. I don’t think I’ve seen any security issues in Miva Merchant 5.5’s core. When potential security issues (or other bugs) come up, Miva and the community are always extremely fast to respond – usually within hours.
12:13 pm on October 6th, 2009
Thanks for your comments, Matt. You’re right. I can’t really say Miva is 100% secure – nothing really is anymore. I think one thing that helps is Miva’s streaming updates, so, unlike most PHP apps, if there is an issue, you’re notified as soon as a fix is available, and it’s a simple click or two to be up to date.
You’re also right about third party app vulnerabilities. It’s better with MM5.5 than it was with MM4, for a variety of reasons, but still, it’s possible to really cause problems if coded poorly or released too quickly. Fortunately the community is tight-knit enough to deal with all this together.
11:50 am on October 7th, 2009
Thanks for the kind words about Miva Merchant and the excellent post
12:11 pm on October 7th, 2009
Someone asked me by email why I liked Miva Merchant. The post was my response.
4:39 pm on October 14th, 2009
That’s good stuff. I am Relationship Manager for Heartland, we are the 4th largest processor and are endorsed by 36 state restaurant associations and process for Yankee, Cowboy stadium and over 300,000 merchants, we are the good guys. I have a client that is currently utilizing yahoo store iPayment but can’t use us to process his credit cards. They process about $300,000-500,000 per month so I was going to switch them to Miva. How hard is this process? Can Miva assist with conversion?
Thanks,
Anthony
HPS
Austin, Texas
10:45 am on October 15th, 2009
The process is only potentially difficult if there are unusual customizations, or the client wants the exact checkout process steps and look and feel. Otherwise, moves from other carts to Miva Merchant are done every day. Miva Merchant, the company, might be able to help with the conversion. There are also independent consultants who specialize in Miva Merchant. I suggest posting to the Work for Hire forum:
http://extranet.mivamerchant.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=55
You might also checkout out my Miva Merchant tutorials at MerchantTutorials.com.