One major flaw of Miva Merchant is its lack of built in SEO support. Sure there are plenty of modules you can install to extend its SEO features, but with a shopping cart that is as widely used as Miva Merchant, these features need to be built in.

The Miva team has been working very hard over the recent months to solve many of these problems. Just the other day the developers over at Miva Merchant announced that Miva Merchant 5.5 will be released in March 2008 at the 2008 Miva Merchant Conference. This is great news for any Miva store owner, or any Miva developer. Here is a preview of what you can expect from 5.5.
New features of Miva Merchant 5.5 include:

• Full CSS support out of the box.
• Skins: The power to package all template pages of a Miva Merchant site into a bundle that can be applied to another site globally, changing an entire look and feel at once. Skins can also be edited with programs like Dreamweaver, radically extending a designer's ability to develop Miva Merchant sites.
• Many more features TBA.

Miva 5.5 is not a totally new platform. Rather it is a group of features and added functionality built on top of the Miva 5 code base. It looks like this update is going to add some great new features to Miva Merchant and also give the shopping cart some much needed built in SEO features.

Rick Wilson who is Miva Merchant’s Executive Vice President said the following,

“There are no API changes in 5.5. We're calling it 5.5 because it's going to add a lot to the 5 platform but at the end of the day it's still a Version 5 release.”

The release date for Miva 5.5 is set to be at the 2008 Miva Merchant Conference – Feb. 28, 29, and March 1st. Any serious developer or Miva store owner should attend the conference. The following information is taken directly from the 2008 conference website.

Who should attend the conference?

• Online Merchants
  With the launch of Miva Merchant 5.5 and it’s new SEO friendly features, this years conference will have a track dedicated to helping merchants market their store through more highly effective SEO and SEM. In addition Merchants will be able to learn more about converting customers with Google Checkout, PayPal Express Checkout and other products like HackerSafe.
• Web designers
  With significant new design features being enabled with native CSS and skins support, this year's conference will have a strong focus on showing designers how to increase the profitability of their business with Miva Merchant as the cornerstone of their e-commerce offering.
• Miva Merchant developers and web hosts
  Miva Merchant hosts and developers will have the best opportunity of the year to network, brainstorm and work with their colleagues and come up to speed on the latest in the Miva Merchant Community and best practices in the industry. If you’re business depends on Miva Merchant you can’t afford to miss this conference.

Another reason to attend it that Miva Merchant 5.5 will be released at the conference and attendees with a Miva Merchant 4 or 5 store will receive a complimentary upgrade to 5.5.
More information about the 2008 Miva Merchant Conference can be found at their website: http://smallbusiness.miva.com/conference_2008/

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.