Cart of the Week: Miva Merchant

We count over 300 shopping cart platforms — licensed, hosted, and open source. In our “Cart of the Week” series, we profile a single shopping cart, asking about its strengths and weaknesses. We’ll then ask a competitor about it, too.

In this installment, we’ve featured Miva Merchant, a popular licensed cart launched in 1996. We asked Rick Wilson, executive vice president, about the cart’s benefits. We then asked David Hills, CEO of ShopSite, for his evaluation.

Rick Wilson

Practical Ecommerce: What is Miva’s biggest strength?

Rick Wilson: Our enterprise-level architecture combined with flexibility. You can make a Miva Merchant store do virtually anything you need. Do you need to cycle last week’s best sellers as front-page features and offer free shipping on just those products? No problem. Do you need a store with 250,000 products in it? No problem. Do you need a store with both retail pricing and unique per-customer pricing for your 250 returning customers? No problem. Do you want to do all of the above, have 100 percent control over the look and feel, and not have to spend a fortune on an enterprise-level implementation? Miva Merchant is the choice for all of that and more.

PEC: What are Miva’s biggest weaknesses?

Wilson: From a design standpoint, our learning curve can be steep. Miva Merchant makes a lot of sense once you understand the logic used to build the product. However, many designers don’t think about those issues and struggle to understand the method to our madness.

PEC: What are your plans for future cart development?

Wilson: The two biggest things on our roadmap right now are continuing growth to allow larger stores to run Miva Merchant (our customers keep growing, and we’re staying ahead of them) and focusing on solving the problem highlighted above, which is to make the product easier to use and better documented for web developers and novices alike.

PEC: Other thoughts for our readers?

Wilson: Miva Merchant has the best track record in ecommerce, bar none. When it comes to the technology powering an online store, you want a product that has been through billions of dollars of real orders. Only Miva Merchant has that track record.

Competitor’s View

David Hills, CEO of ShopSite, offers his thoughts on Miva Merchant.

PEC: What are Miva Merchant’s strengths?

David Hills: Miva originally was a set of programmers’ tools for building a shopping cart. From that early history, Miva has a number of application programming interfaces and third-party add-ons.

PEC: What are Miva’s weaknesses?

Hills: Miva’s many APIs and third-party add-ons make upgrading to newer versions hard since backward compatibility is an issue. Also, being built on programming tools and then adding a user interface on top of those tools means that the product is not as easy to use as others that were first designed with the user interface in mind. Miva was also designed to create dynamic pages. Every shopper that clicks on a dynamic product page needs to have Miva first process that page, which can slow performance and server resource usage.

PEC: Other thoughts for our readers about Miva?

Hills: Miva has been around for a long time, so you can find a number of hosting providers offering it. However, in the past few years, the company has been bought (2004) and sold (2007). The changing of ownership has affected the product and support and the relationship with hosting providers.