Choosing the right shopping cart is one of the most important decisions you can make when starting a new e-commerce business. You want something that has all the features you need, while being very flexible and extendable as your store grows. You don’t want to get a few months into your new e-commerce business to discover that your shopping cart software is holding you back from growing and achieving your financial goals. The most important advice I can give you is do your research. There are literarily 100’s of shopping cart platforms out there. It can be a daunting task to filter through them all. Write down a list of the 10 most important features you are looking for. Do you want a built in affiliate program? Do you want an easy to use backend admin interface? Once you have you list of important features, narrow down 2 or 3 shopping carts that fulfill your needs. Take each of them for a test dive and see which one works best for you. Your research in the beginning will pay off in the long run.

To make your life easier I have compiled a list of Pros and Cons to Miva Merchant. Miva is a great shopping cart with a lot of great features. However until you test is out and do your research, you don’t really know if it will be right for you. Here is a list of the top pros and cons to Miva Merchant.

Pros

Extendable - Miva is a modular shopping cart. This means that there are external modules that you can purchase (usually $30 to $100 each) to extend the functionality of the shopping cart. Do you want to be able to accept coupons in your store? No problem, just pick up the Ultimate Coupon Module for $99.95 and you are on you way. The modules are usually easy to install and always work as described. This modular approach allows you to customize your store with exactly the features you need.

Read about the top 10 Miva Modules Here

Complete customization via backend user interface – One of the strong points of Miva Merchant is that it has a very robust backend interface that is used for building your store as well as product and customer management. Most free shopping carts out there are php and template based. This means if you are going to try to build your store yourself (not a good idea) you have to know PHP and My SQL. This is not the case with Miva Merchant. Because of its nice backend admin you can build you site in Dreamweaver and copy and paste your code into the appropriate sections. It makes development time much faster than other shopping cart systems.

Versioning History - One of the best new features of Miva Merchant 5.0 is the built in versioning system. The system automatically keeps backups of all the changes you make to your site. This is extremely helpful if you make a mistake and want to quickly change it back, or test out new features of the site. You will always have a backup copy just in case thing don’t go as planned.

Built in support for most merchant accounts and shipping methods – you want a shopping cart that supports all the major merchant accounts. This makes setting up yours very simple and you can be assured that everything will work correctly.

The same goes with shipping. If you ship via USPS then you want your shopping cart to have built in support for it. Miva supports all the major shipping methods and you can even buy external modules to give you more functionality.

Built in spreadsheet import / export – Importing and exporting your products via spreadsheet saves you HUGE amounts of time when you want to make a large number of updates or add new products. This feature is essential to any shopping cart.

Automatic synchronization to QuickBooks – Even this feature is not built in, most shopping carts don’t even offer it. It is called Synchro. Though pricy at $399, the time saved is well worth the investment. It eliminates having to enter customer and order data into QuickBooks. It synchronizes the two eliminating hours of wasted work for you.

It is FREE (with hosting) – Miva is a merchant is a hosted shopping cart that you get for free with your monthly hosting. Miva hosting is usually more expensive than standard hosting, costing $25 to $50 per month. This may seem like a lot but you are getting a free shopping cart which retails for $1000. You also get free support from your web host should you run into any problems. It is well worth the money.

Cons

Lacking Built in Features - By far the biggest complaint of Miva is the fact that it is lacking a lot of essential built in features. These features have to be added on with external modules which cost additional money. This is a tradeoff that must be made. Because Miva is modular is gives you the choice of which features you want to add on. This is good, but a lot of people feel that most of these add on features should already be built in to the software – such as the ability to accept coupons. You can get all the functionality you need, you will just have to pay extra for it.

Backend admin not user friendly for beginners – As I said above the Miva admin is very robust and packed full of features to manage your store. However it takes some time to get used to. For people who are not very computer literate it can be frustrating at times. If you are patient and take your time to learn its features, it becomes very easy and comfortable to use.

No PHP support – Because Miva is a compiled shopping cart and uses its own language (MivaScript) it is not possible to execute any PHP code within your cart. This can be frustrating if you need small customization that can be done with PHP very easy. You either have to use JavaScript, or find a module which has the functionality you are looking for.

No built in order tracking – This is one feature that I felt should have been included in the core of Miva. Order tracking is essential to and e-commerce store. Your customers will constantly email you asking where their order is. Miva has no built in functionality to help streamline this process. Luckily there is a great module called Ultimate Order Status that can be added on to your Miva installation and will give you all the order tracking features you need.

Not search engine friendly out of the box – Miva can be a very search engine friendly shopping cart, but you will have to purchase a few additional modules in order to easily add Meta tags or Search friendly links. However once you add these modules it becomes a great search engine friendly shopping cart which Google and the other search engines love to index.

You can read our Ultimate SEO Guide for Miva Merchant Here

These are the top pros and cons of the Miva 5 shopping cart. Don’t let any of the cons scare you away. Thousands of e-commerce businesses use Miva for a reason – It is a great shopping cart system. Take it for a test drive and you will be pleasantly surprised

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.