Miva Review

MIVA Merchant and MIVA Commerce Service Provider

MIVA Corporation offers merchants and software developers a complete line of products to build, manage, and operate virtual storefronts.

Founded in 1996, today MIVA is the leading provider of merchant e-commerce software to small and medium-sized businesses.

The MIVA product line includes:

MIVA Merchant as a storefront development and management system. It integrates catalog, product, fulfillment, maintenance, category management, shopping cart, order processing, and credit card processing in association with many of the MIVA payment providers, including Authorize.net, VeriSign.com, and several others. Merchants use a browser-based interface and can extend or customize the system using MIVA Script (an XML-based scripting language). MIVA Merchant offers the ability to custom configure processing modules, such as payment gateways and shipping routines, which integrate with MIVA Merchant.

MIVA Order is a transaction-enabled order form designed to meet the needs of a merchant who has a limited number of items to sell. Merchants simply incorporate a link from the existing web page where their products are sold thereby permitting customers to seamlessly access the order form and make purchases. Merchants are able to create and manage custom product order forms with provisions that simplify the process of calculating sales tax, shipping costs and currency formatting. MIVA Order has 12 built-in payment processing options:

Credit Card Payment With Simple Validation Authorize.Net PayQuake US Merchant Systems Rodopi Payment Gateway PayPal Instant Payment Notification CyberSource Verisign Payflow Link Verisign Payflow Pro Cardservice/LinkPoint Payment Gateway

E-Commerce Exchange/QuickCommerce Lynk Internet Processing Moneris e-SELECT GlobalCommerce Innovative Gateway Solutions Paradata Payment COD Check debit-it! - Electronic Check Processing e-ValuCheck

MIVA Overview

MIVA Merchant 5 provides merchants with all the features of previous versions of MIVA Merchant, along with new affiliate management, site traffic reporting, attribute templates, merchandising capabilities for store promotion, integration with Intuit QuickBooks and additional controls over the look and feel of the storefront.

One new highlight of the system is the inventory tracking feature that allows merchants to display on hand counts for products and automatically reduce inventory as products are sold.

MIVA Merchant 5 is also integrated with QuickBooks from Intuit Software to enable merchants to better synchronize customer and product information between their online stores and any brick and mortar storefronts.

At the heart of the MIVA system is MIVA Empresa, an interpretive engine for the MIVA Script programming language that is the core technology behind MIVA's e-commerce products. Empresa is a server-side program that acts as an interpretative engine for MIVA Script, an XML-based programming language that is the core technology behind all of MIVA's products. When running MIVA Merchant, it is necessary for the Web server to also run a copy of MIVA Empresa in order to interpret the commands. MIVA Mia, a free downloadable version of Empresa, is available for personal workstation use, such as testing a store before uploading the store to a Web server. A MIVA API exposes Empresa for customized database queries, function enhancements to merchant server processing, and additions of custom processing through modules.

MIVA also provides a number of venues for users to discuss MIVA products. These forums are monitored by MIVA technical support to help users with problems and questions. Forums are accessible through majordomo at the MIVA Support section of their Web site.

MIVA Costs

The MIVA Merchant 5. retails $995 and is provided free of charge with shared and VPS hosting plans from e-Business Express. Plans also include your choice of Authorize.net or Verisign Payflow Link payment gateway setup and activation.
All MIVA Merchant hosting plans come with a 30-day money back guarantee.

Add-on Modules

MIVA Merchant’s popularity and modular design has led many developers to design and market complimentary plug-in modules for adding functionality such as PayPal payment support, email mailing list support, coupon modules, discount modules, etc. A few of the more popular module developers are ModStop, Viking Coders, Emporium Plus and Phosphor Media.

Overall

MIVA offers a variety of affordable systems to fit any budget or hosting preference that a merchant might desire. They also make it simple for those merchants to scale their systems up as their business grows without porting their storefronts to entirely new environments.

Pros

MIVA software is affordable, easy to use, and flexible enough to support most any type of online merchant. Because of their history and market penetration (over 80,000 installations) it's likely that MIVA will be around for some time in an otherwise crowded merchant server space. MIVA has also developed a network of hundreds of Value Added Resellers (VARs) throughout the world.

Cons

Critics of MIVA Merchant charge that the security of downloading order and payment data could use improvement.