One of the essential items to include on you ecommerce Web site is a shopping cart. It is vital that you have a shopping cart so that your customers can select multiple items to buy. Shopping cart software makes it easy and convenient for customers to buy items and then pay for them. Shopping cart software should be easy for the customer to use, and compatible with your hosting platform. One shopping cart that you might consider is Miva Merchant.

Miva Merchant shopping cart

Miva Merchant is a good shopping cart. And it ought to be. It costs $295.00 in its least expensive incarnation. However, it is hard to beat the features offered by the Miva Merchant shopping cart. Here are some of the features that you can expect from Miva Merchant:

• Shipping and tax configuration: These are advanced abilities that are not usually seen at this level with other shopping cart software. You are not likely to get the level of sophistication seen with the Miva tax and shipping calculators with free shopping carts. If you have a FedEx account, Miva can be configured to work with that so that you get the best shipping information. Real time United States Postal Service rates are also used.
• Affiliate capabilities: If you have affiliates, Miva Merchant shopping cart can easily help you figure out commissions on click throughs and outright sales.
• Special offers: Miva Merchant provides you with the ability to have your customers automatically emailed for special promotions and sales.
• Quickbooks integration: You can easily keep track of inventory, invoices and payments with Miva’s Quickbooks integrations. Unfortunately, it will cost you nearly $400 extra to take advantage of this convenient feature.

Miva Merchant is also well known for its ease of use. There are merchant tools that are easy to set up with a step by step process. Once you have Miva Merchant shopping cart installed, it is possible to customize the cart with how you want. Easy navigation makes the whole process simple. However, the ease of use doesn’t start until you actually have the cart installed.

Installing Miva Merchant is a bit difficult. Miva requires specific software, so you can’t just use this shopping cart with any host. You have to specifically search out a host that has Miva software and is compatible with the shopping cart. In fact, if you want to use Miva, you should make sure that your ecommerce Web host can support the shopping cart. This is the first thing you should do before deciding to purchase Miva Merchant shopping cart.

Another unfortunate thing about Miva is the customer service. Trying to get help through the difficult installation process is hard. You may be kept waiting for quite some time for answers to your questions. Once you are a customer, and you do have the shopping cart installed, the customer service remains horrendous. You have to pay between $150 and $600 a year in order to retain technical support. There are some guides and some helps on the Miva Merchant Web site, but if you run into any sort of real issue, you will not get help unless you pay for it.

Overall Miva Merchant shopping cart is a good one. It comes with advanced features and is easy to use. Unfortunately, the price is advanced as well, and if you run into any problems you are out of luck unless you are willing to pay for customer service. If you have the budget for a really good shopping cart program, then Miva Merchant could work for you. Just make sure all of your ducks are in a row first.