One of the most under used and somewhat hidden features of Miva Merchant 5.0 are the built in custom product fields. If you have any experience with Miva 4, you’ll know that you needed an additional module to gain this functionality. Now that this feature is built in, adding custom fields to your product display page is simple and easy.

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create a MSRP field, which displays the MSRP, crossed out in red. Simple additions like this can really help increase your overall conversion rates.

First in order to use the custom product fields you have to enable them. Expand your store in the Miva admin menu by clicking on the plus next to your store name. Next, click on the red “utilities” link. Now to the right side, click the checkbox next to Custom Fields to enable them. Click Update. You should now see a link for Custom Product Fields at the top of the page.

Click the “Custom Product Fields” link. Here you can add a new product field. We are going to add a MSRP field.

Click the “Update” button.

Now that we have created our custom product field, we have to edit the PROD page template to get it to display. Navigate to your product page template within your pages section. Click on the “Product Display Layout” link at the top.

There are two things we have to do on this page. First, we need to enable our newly created MSRP field. To do this we have to click the “point and click mode” link at the bottom of the page. Once you are at the point and click section click the checkbox next to MSRP field.

**Caution – If you have edited your PROD page, meaning you customized it already, when you go to assign the MSPR field to your PROD page, for some reason it reverts back to its default settings. An easy way around this is just to copy the entire contents of your “Product Display Layout” into a text file. Then go in and check the box next to your MSRP field to assign it to the PROD page. Click Update. Now take the code you copied and paste it back into your “Product Display Layout” page.

Now we have assigned our new product field to our PROD page, we need to add some Miva code to display it. It should look like this:
<mvt:if expr="NOT ISNULL l.settings:product:customfield_values:customfields:MSRP">
<s>MSRP: &mvt:product:customfield_values:customfields:MSRP;</s>
</mvt:if>

This will display the contents of the MSRP field with a line through it. Feel free to add custom CSS styles to change the font size and color to fit your needs.  Hit update and you are almost finished.

The last thing to do is navigate to the product you want to show the MSRP for and add in the value. The field will appear under the “Custom Fields” link.

Hit update and go look at your product within your Miva Store. Your new MSRP field should show on your product detail page as expected.

About the Author: Brennan Heyde is an e-commerce consultant working in San Diego, Ca. He specializes in online marketing and SEO for e-commerce.  Have a struggling e-commerce website? – Contact Brennan today for a site analysis.