Miva Merchant is Back

I recently attended the Miva Merchant Conference in February titled ‘Back to the Future’. The reason for that title is that Miva was bought back from Findwhat after they sold to Findwhat about 3 years ago. The Miva Merchant shopping cart has always been a favorite of ours, but when Findwhat bought the company the small, sort of friendly relationship we had with the company became strained. Many of our long time contacts moved on and so we weren’t getting the same great treatment we got in the beginning.

But all that has change now! The new team at Miva is awesome! And we got a look at the new not yet released version 5.5. It is really exciting to see all the upgrades they have made to the product. One of my favorite new additions is that customers will be able to use skins that they can change with a click of a button. For example if you have a skin that you create for Christmas, then when November rolls around you can just click to add that skin and it immediately changes the whole look and feel of your storefront to a Christmas theme. You could do the same thing for all the holidays… There will no doubt be lots of new skins created by the many devoted Miva developers that you can purchase online. Miva Central is an online marketplace with thousands of plug ins, books etc. that you can use with Miva Merchant. Or you can develop a skin right in Dreamweaver or any other html editor and use it. Creating your own skin might be a little daunting for a newbie, so I would suggest most people just purchase a skin, or hire a developer to create them for you.

We are proud to be one of the hosting partners that have been with Miva since the very beginning. We started in 1999 and offered Miva Merchant to our customers then and have continued to offer and support it since then. There have been other shopping carts that have come and gone, and so we are glad that we stuck with them. And now with the great new leadership and exciting product enhancements it’s even more exciting that we are going to be able to continue to offer this product to our customers.

If you don’t already have Miva Merchant on your account, and you are not on the Value Plan you get Miva for FREE as an Apollo Hosting customer. Apollo Hosting is a Premier Miva Hosting Partner which means we have close ties to Miva Corporation and get certain privileges like on-site training once a year. It also means that our technical support team is trained in Miva Merchant and can help with most problems. Miva does offer it’s own technical support for for a fee for larger issues and that is an option for customers as well. That’s a lot considering many companies do not offer any technical support for their products.

Tamara Field
President
Apollo Hosting, Inc.