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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 after 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.
Do you have reasons I haven't listed, or even reasons you don't like Miva Merchant?
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