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These days we are building more and more e-commerce sites for clients and Miva Merchant has proven itself to be one of our more valuable tools in really delivering a top-notch storefront. So when the folks over at Miva Merchant HQ asked us to guest author a post on their blog, we jumped at the opportunity. We’ve developed a wide range of online stores using many different shopping cart platforms over the years, such as osCommerce, CRE-Loaded, Zen-cart, Magento (Community & Enterprise), Yahoo Stores, eBay Stores, Drupal and even Wordpress to name a few. With this kind of experience under our belt, we can tell you without hesitation that the road to success is much smoother with Miva Merchant.

This month at the Miva blog we discuss making your website design top-notch while also keeping it relevant to your industry and audience.

I first started working with Miva Merchant back in 2001 as a freelance developer. Back then, most people’s first exposure to Miva Merchant (originally Miva) was the result of it being offered as a free shopping cart add-on to their hosting plan. Since it was free software, many small businesses began using it without even really considering other choices. Over the years since then, many free open source shopping cart platforms have come and gone; and while many of those original Miva Merchant customers may have jumped ship along the way in pursuit of that mythical perfect free shopping cart, those who stuck with Miva have been the beneficiaries of a mature, solid, well-built platform that has made millionaires of many of those first small business owners.

Read our complete post at the Miva Merchant Blog.

In the day to day hustle and bustle of running your own online business, it’s important to periodically go through your own website and ensure that things are in proper order. Just as you would with any retail business, it’s important to “walk the showroom floor”, so to speak and make sure that the things you depend on to operate your business are functioning correctly. With your online store, you should go through every step of your checkout process and actually run a live dollar transaction to make sure that everything works and also that your customer experience is the way it should be. Things are constantly changing online – new web browsers get released and updated, website hosting servers get patched, security subscriptions expire etc, and these changes can cause formatting errors, popup security alerts and even broken pages and checkout problems. Very often these problems could be occurring for days or even weeks before you find out. Don’t rely on your customer to take time out of their busy day to notify you of any errors they encounter.

This is especially important if you have employees making continuous updates to your website content. Most shopping cart platforms, including MIVA Merchant, have global headers and footers for content that is included on every page of the site, such as your site navigation links, footer information and promotional banners. This content is being delivered to the web browser when a visitor is on both non-secure pages as well as on secure pages, such as when in the checkout process. As the global areas of your site get updated with new content, you need to make sure the links to banners or security badges or any tracking codes are created correctly so that they are accessible on every page in the website and do not cause security alerts or broken images.

Of course, having a reliable and professional development support team handling your store maintenance and website updates will minimize any shopping cart problems, but it’s always smart business to be hands-on with your online store. Even in the absence of any technical problems, it’s still a good idea to run through things and keep the customer experience fresh and up-to-date. Never just assume that if your shopping cart worked ok yesterday, it still will today. Check, check and triple check.

The Restaurant Depot is one of the nation’s largest restaurant suppliers, with over 70 warehouse locations nationwide. But in order to truly compete in this modern digital age, you have to be represented online. That’s where the partnership between Durrani and The Restaurant Depot was launched. We’ve been with them from the beginning, designing and developing their first online storefront with MIVA Merchant version 4 and recently embarked on a design overhaul and major migration upgrade to MIVA Merchant 5.5. MIVA 5.5 provides online merchants with a ton of flexibility and expansion opportunity. The Restaurant Depot, online at TheRDStore.com, relies on Durrani to support their online store and product database of almost 10,000 products – one of the largest online restaurant equipment and supply retailers. 

 
But we didn’t stop with just their main online store. The latest and most exciting development with Restaurant Depot has been the creation of several prototype in-store kiosks, which feature a cloned version of their primary website and allow customers to easily search for available products both in store and online. This gives customers a much wider choice of equipment and supply items then just their local neighborhood warehouse can provide. If the Kiosk prototypes are successful, Restaurant Depot hopes to roll them out to most of their regional stores.  For us at Durrani, this project was a huge success for many reasons – one of which is that it demonstrates the strength of the MIVA Merchant e-commerce platform. Clients always ask us if MIVA is the right choice for their business and The RD Store is a great example that shows MIVA can keep up with the best of them and perform at an enterprise-level that will grow as big and as fast as your business.

The latest, highly anticipated 5.5 release of MIVA Merchant is now available. The new release includes a long list of enhancements that really smooth-out some of the rough edges that has dogged MIVA for the past few years. MIVA has always been a favorite of programmers and developers but many considered it lacking the back-end usability and ease of use that most non-technical business owners desired. Checking orders and performing simple day-to-day operations of your online business wasn’t as intuitive as some other shopping carts. MIVA has taken great strides to improve this in this latest major release.

Here at Durrani, we are still working our way through the latest features and how best to use them, but so far the admin interface is a welcome improvement.

The upgrade to 5.5 is free for current users of MIVA Merchant 5.0 and is only $99 for users of previous versions until May 31st. The upgrade is automatic on 5.0 installation when you run the upgrade wizard in the admin area. Customers running versions older then 5.0 who have heavily customized their store with modules and OpenUI configurations, should think through the impact of upgrading and make sure they take into consideration everything that needs to be changed for an efficient migration. Open UI modules, design templates and all modules from versions older then 5.0 are not compatible.

For a complete list of the latest features and fixes click the link below to view the complete post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our preferred shopping cart of choice has always been MIVA Merchant. We develop and support several other carts, but if we are building an e-commerce site from scratch or have the option of switching a client over, we use MIVA Merchant. MIVA is much easier to configure and customize and getting a site launched is faster. MIVA is also very expandable for the future growth of an online business.

Last year we designed and constructed a completely new MIVA 5.0 storefront for our client, Walleye Direct (www.walleyedirect.com). We’ve watched Walleye grow from a side-job dream idea to a full-time business with sales rolling in every day. We continue to manage the Walleye MIVA website and also provide SEO optimization and marketing.

We’re exited that WalleyeDirect.com was this months featured MIVA site in the MIVA Merchant Galleria.

Click here for the complete interview with Walleye owner Jesse Ness. And for some fresh Walleye fish from the brisk rivers of Canada, visit www.walleyedirect.com.