Well, hello from the Motor City! Things here are very well. The transition to Miva 5 has been going smoothly, I believe. We seem to have an issue with our server turning off Miva 4.22. This creates a little confusion because I am actually running two separate shopping carts off of the same site with both Miva(s) running. I’ve only had a few issues so far. I guess there is the possibility that if a search engine has indexed a 4.22 page, then someone could click in and buy it. That’s fine, if the order stops there. The problem is this, if they put that item in their shopping cart, then link back into the meat of the site and start buying products that are part of the Miva 5 shopping cart. When they hit the button to view their cart they are invariably going to be missing some items.

We’ve had a drop in sales this week, but I’m still enthusiastic. I have more control, and since I am admittedly a CONTROL FREAK when it comes to the design content of my pages, I am happy.

I’ve also installed a module called Tell a friend, whereby visitors can send a page to another friend or friends. This is working so far. I just did it yesterday, so I’ll keep you updated on that. I’ve found the Miva chat board extremely helpful with all of my questions about the software. Any miva users should check it out, and return often. It’s really useful, and they are super responsive to any questions. Check it out here: http://extranet.miva.com/forums/

We’ve hired someone to help us with our next transition to start using Miva Synchro so my partner Lee Ann, who handles all order fulfillment, can streamline the process by downloading orders directly from Miva into Quickbooks and updating inventory, printing shipping labels, interfacing with the post office to print labels, etc.. Lee Ann contacted a consultant through the Quickbooks website to help us integrate our whole show.
At this point, I wanted to share with you the email we received from our consultant on the integration. There will be more to follow, as we actually start this transition within the next week.

Lee Ann,
If you want to download Miva transactions to QB, you have to purchase Miva’s sync program.

The syncing goes to the invoice or sales receipt function. Sales order would have been considerably better, but invoices will have to work if you stay with Miva-it’s not the end of the world, just not nearly as preferable. Sales receipts would not be a good place to interface.

The “link” to the post office looks more like just the ability to transfer your customer names and addresses in a merge operation the USPO program, but not a real “link” as in you could run each new transaction out to the USPO program. This is ok for repeat customers, but not as good as you’d like for new customers.

The people in tech support are VERY difficult to work with…I was unimpressed…if you want to stay with Miva, then the thing to do would be work on the sales department to convince them of the need to improve both of these functions…I could make a very good case to them in your favor!

I see these alternatives…stay with Miva, purchase the “sync”, live with the deficiencies until such time as they may be convinced to improve their program link to QB and to the USPO. That or shop for another program instead of Miva. I suspect the first option is your preference, but thought I should put it on the table. If your volume goes up the way you project, Miva’s deficiencies could become huge, even with the sync program in place (unless they make some changes).

The sync function takes a bit of setting up, but it doesn’t look like the end of the world. It needs to be completely set up and debugged before you start running it into your real data.

My suggestion is to invest in the sync program, even with its deficiencies, at least to get you over your immediate crisis. Then see how it goes for a while, but be prepared and open to the possible need to look for shopping cart if they don’t improve their sync or you find their deficiencies unbearable.

Ouch! I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. Our decision is to stick with Miva because I know it now, quite well! More to come…

Well, it is a glorious day here in Michigan, the sun is shining, sales are way up this week, and my kids are tucked neatly away at school. In any case, I also have a major deal going on with the site. I have upgraded to Miva 5, and so far am happy with it, well, kinda. I haven’t gone live with it yet, as I have to reestablish each and every product link from Adobe GoLive. I will make my transition over the weekend.

What I like: I have so much more control over the pages. I can change the order of my price fields, photos, etc. I do have to brush up on my coding…there’s a reason I use Adobe Go Live..little to no html for me to hash through..sorry Brian!..some of us don’t have your passion.

What I don’t like…this is a biggie… all of my miva pages that have been so beautifully indexed on the search engines, are about to become obselete! This is a flippin’ catastrophe as far as I’m concerned! I have asked my host if there’s a way to have them forwarded, but I bet they can’t be. Is there any way to soften this blow?
Question for Brian, or whomever…The statistics that I see when I log into miva that tell my how many hits I have, my sales to date, are reset in Miva 5. Is this also going to hurt my search engine ranking, too? I think I already know the answer.

I’m curious if anyone else has done this recently, and what their experience was, that’s it for now?

It sounds so serious right? There’s nothing as beautiful as a well designed ad via email to pull in great sales for the week. I’ve mentioned before that we send a weekly SaleMail to our subscriber list. I send out some each day for 5 or 6 days.

Yesterday I did a little experiment and put in less text, and made it more photo intensive…big mistake! As I was searching through my rejected email addresses, saw my own personal address in there indicating that I didn’t get my own SaleMail due to a high spam score! Yikes!

Needless to say, I redesigned immediately, and everything is back to normal. I would say my ratio of text to photos is about 40:60. If you’d like to see what didn’t work, click here. And then check this one, which so far, is much more successful. My sales have already picked back up today.

I will continue to tweak my design to get the best results with my SaleMail. But from now on, I’ll test it on myself first. Yesterday’s sales were grim because of a bad design decision. I can’t afford a drastic mistake like that with Mother’s Day approaching, a notoriously big holiday for us!

It’s a relatively warm Spring day here. A very nice change for Michigan. It snowed yesterday. So I’ll take cloudy and luke warm any day over snow in April. Now, down to business…
It must be true that I rank in different places on a search depending on where the search originates. This has confused me for quite some time. I’m told by my customers that they found me on Yahoo! under a specific search, and I can’t find myself there. Is there a way to check your ranking regionally? Or am I only limited to just Michigan stats?

It’s so difficult to gauge whether or not you need to supplement with paid search if you don’t really have a feeling of where you rank on the regional levels. If anyone knows, please share.

That’s all for now, got to go put the kids to bed.

I’ve fallen off of the face of the earth because it’s coming up on Mother’s Day, our biggest holiday next to Christmas. We have buggy stuff going on with our shopping cart. For no reason at all miva has been subracting a dollar under the shipping category when processing cards. This has only happened a few times, but why? My server folk are working on a solution.

Also, since we’ve posted “international shipping” on our site, we are constantly being contacted to see if we ship to Nigeria. Ecommerce sites need to beware that many of these inquiries involve credit card fraud. Be very careful. I don’t want to turn off this new shipping option. It’s great growth opportunity for our business.
I am making a lot of Grandmother’s Hats, a custom designed hat for Mother’s Day. It takes time and concentration, and I don’t really have time to fuss with shopping cart issues. I really don’t mean to complain, business is very good, and these are just the issues that go along with it.

It’s a lot of fun to be busy, but it’s really hard to do it and shuffle kids around to school, play dates, sports, and then make custom hats, photograph and post new product online, take product out of stock, etc. The days are really long, but they are also a lot of fun. Somehow when it’s your own business the motivation just comes. Especially when it’s going well. And besides, what job could I have that would let me have the nutty schedule and be there for the kids?

That’s if for now.