Wombat Update Released
Miva Merchant’s advanced and scalable “Wombat” Update creates traction for online merchants with streamlined order management features and new CSS UI

San Diego, CA, 2010/05/10 –

Miva Merchant’s advanced and scalable “Wombat” Update creates traction for online merchants with streamlined order management features and new CSS UI
Veteran online shopping cart leader Miva Merchant today announced the launch of its long-awaited Production Release 7, codename “Wombat.” Notable among its features are powerful new tools expediting order processing and handling, sophisticated inventory tracking, and PA-DSS compliance-readiness.

(Vocus/PRWEB) San Diego, CA 07 May 2010–Veteran online shopping cart leader Miva Merchant today announced the launch of its long-awaited Production Release 7, codename “Wombat.” After more than 15 months in development, and 6 months of rigorous beta testing, the Miva Merchant 5.5 Production Release 7 adds many significant features to the already robust shopping cart software. Notable among those features are powerful new tools expediting order processing and handling, sophisticated inventory tracking, and PA-DSS compliance-readiness. The sleek new CSS UI merits its kudos from designers and developers, who were extensively tapped for their wish lists at the early stages of Wombat’s development.

Timesaving for day-to-day operations drives new features for such tasks as post-transaction order adjustments and printing shipping labels, as well as taking phone orders from directly inside the admin panel. The scalable and advanced Inventory Variants allow for complex kit building and inventory at the attribute level, including dynamic pricing and quantity-on-hand updates based on attribute selections. With the PA-DSS mandatory deadline looming, all payment application providers must be PA-DSS compliant no later than July 1 2010. The compliance is being exacted from software providers who make electronic payment applications that utilize credit cards.

The all new Miva Merchant CSS UI has been built from the ground up to be W3C Compliant. With the new CSS UI, it’s now possible to completely change the look and feel of a site without touching the template code, reducing the risk of breaking important functionality by separating code, content and design. The CSS UI gives the merchant a modern ecommerce site right out of the box, shortening the time to launch a new online store. Additionally, the functional layout provides an optimized shopping flow, customer order processing and improved SEO architecture that is more intuitive for web designers and developers to change.

Rick Wilson, President and COO of Miva Merchant, commented, “Our ‘Wombat’ release truly pushes the foundation of our product to the next level. Miva Merchant has always been known for making scalable enterprise-class webstores available even on a small business budget. We’ve now added core features to our ecommerce product to make deploying a store even easier and faster for online merchants; plus the numerous new api’s pave the way to continuing cutting-edge advancement.”

Miva Merchant has been building feature-rich e-commerce software since 1995. Over 50,000 merchants use the company’s highly customizable, intuitive and scalable shopping cart solution. These merchants range from the hand-selected boutique products store to the manufacturer directly integrating their manufacturing with distributor access and an online retail presence. To see examples of stores running on Miva Merchant, visit http://www.mivamerchant.com/

About Miva Merchant
Founded in 1996, Miva Merchant has deployed over 200,000 online storefronts and provides a leading platform for online enterprises. The Miva Merchant Platform consists of software, services, and a partner network assembled for the purpose of helping to create and enhance online business. Miva Merchant partners are at the forefront in servicing the increasing number of enterprises using the Internet to expand their market reach. Partners can easily and quickly integrate the Miva Merchant platform of applications and API’s with their existing services to deliver complete online business solutions. Miva Merchant is a leader in offering the ease of browser-based point and click online business creation, combined with deep customizability and integrated marketing services. For more information about Miva Merchant call 1.858.490.2570 or visit http://www.mivamerchant.com.

ABCs of Selling Online

Rick Wilson, EVP of Miva Merchant, gives an overview on what you need to start selling online with an ecommerce store. Learn & apply the basics to arm yourself with a competitive advantage from the beginning:

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart platforms. This includes licensed carts, hosted carts, and open-source carts. In this, our “Cart Of The Week” feature, we’ll profile a specific shopping cart ask about its strengths and weaknesses. We’ll then ask a competitor about that cart, too.

In this installment, we’ve featured Miva Merchant, a popular licensed cart that has been around for a long time. We asked Rick Wilson, Executive Vice President at Miva, about the benefits of the cart. Then we asked David Hills, CEO of ShopSite, for his evaluation of Miva Merchant.

PeC: What is Miva’s biggest strength?

Wilson: Our enterprise level architecture combined with our flexibility. You can make a store running Miva Merchant do virtually anything you need. Do you need to cycle last week’s best sellers as front page features and offer free shipping on just those products? No problem. Do you need a store with 250,000 products in it? No problem. Do you need a store with both retail pricing and unique per-customer pricing for your 250 returning customers? No problem. Do you want to do all of the above, have 100 percent control over the look and feel and not have to spend a fortune on an enterprise level implementation? Miva Merchant is the choice for all of that and more.

PeC: What is Miva’s biggest weakness?

Wilson: From a design standpoint our learning curve can be steep. Miva Merchant makes a lot of sense once you understand the logic used to build the product, however many web designers/graphics designers just don’t think about those issues and struggle to understand the method to our “madness.”

PeC: What are your plans for future cart development?

Wilson: The two biggest things on our roadmap right now are continuing growth to allow for larger and larger online stores to run Miva Merchant (our customers keep growing and we’re staying ahead of them) and also to focus on solving the problem highlighted above which is to make the product easier to use and better-documented for web developers and novices alike.

PeC: Other thoughts for our readers?

Wilson: Miva Merchant has the best track record in ecommerce, bar none. When it comes to the technology powering your online store, you want to have a product that has been through the rigorousness of billions of dollars of real orders, and only Miva Merchant has that track record.

The view of a competitor to Miva Merchant

David Hills, CEO of ShopSite, offers his thoughts on Miva Merchant.

PeC: What do you think are Miva’s strengths?

Hills: Miva originally was a set of programmer’s tools for building a shopping cart. From that early history, Miva has a number of application programming interfaces (APIs) and a number of third party add-ons.

PeC: What do you think are Miva’s weaknesses?

Hills: Miva’s many APIs and third party add-ons for those APIs make upgrading to newer versions very hard, since backward compatibility is an issue. Also, being built on programming tools and then adding a user interface afterwards on top of those tools means that the product is not as easy to use as others that were first designed with the user interface in mind. Miva was also designed to create dynamic pages. Every shopper that clicks on a dynamic product page needs to have Miva first process that page which obviously can affect performance and server resource usage.

PeC: Other thoughts for our readers about Miva?

Hills: Miva has been around for a long time, so you can find a number of hosting providers offering it. However, in the past few years the company has been bought (2004) and then sold (2007). The changing of ownership no doubt has affected the product, support and the relationship with its hosting providers.

The holiday shopping season is just around the corner and is the perfect time to look for ways to boost revenue for an MVP performance to close out the year. Just about every retail store will have various sales to coax shoppers into visiting their location. Smart retailers know that you or any other consumer will purchase something once inside the store even if it is not on sale. Most online shops do not have this luxury since it is easy to move from store to store online; just takes a few seconds with no wasted gas, driving or crowds. You can use this to your advantage but will likely need to make the incentives for purchasing from you more apparent. Here are some ways to attract attention without having a virtual sign flipper standing on the side of the page shouting “Buy From Me”.

Shipping Deadlines

Buying gifts online are a great way to save money but many consumers are still wary of the risks of buying online.  Some may have even had a very negative experience in the past that has jaded their view of online shopping.  You can make more sales by addressing and eliminating the fears shoppers have on your site before they ever add something to the basket.  A good place to start is a shipping guarantee that the item will arrive by a specific date in perfect condition for gift giving.  As the holidays grow closer this practice is even more important because no one wants to say, your gift is on the way.  Many people will travel this season and either want to take the gifts with them or have them arrive at their destination. If I am leaving on December 22 to go visit Grandma then you can bet I want to know my gift will be at my door no later than December 21st. These consumers need to know exactly when they will get their order otherwise they will buy somewhere else. Make it very apparent when the item will arrive before someone checks out to help boost confidence and move them through the checkout process.

Easy Return Policy

Another big concern of online shoppers is how easy (or hard) it is to return an item. Although a very small percentage of customers will actually need to return an item; the fear of a return being a hassle is enough to scare any buyer away.  Some return policy procedures buyers are increasingly wary of are restocking fees, shipping cost, turn around time and reason for return. No one wants to give a gift that cannot be easily returned no matter what the reason.  If you can go without a restocking fee or cover the shipping cost on returns then do it; even if it is just for the holiday months. You may already have a stellar return policy but you may not be taking full advantage of the policy. Make sure you highlight your return policy right along with your other promotions by displaying them on every page.

Gift wrapping

Holidays are one of the busiest times of the year not only for shopping but also everyone’s task list.  You have cards to fill out and send, parties, parades, plays, community events, family get togethers and more all happening with no extra time to get anything done. Gift wrapping all the gifts you buy online can be a hassle since you may not be getting the item until the last minute anyway. Also, many online gifts are sent directly to the recipient with no one in between to wrap the gift; but this is where you can step in and offer a gift wrapping service to make a few extra bucks while closing a sale you might have otherwise missed out on.

Black Monday

Just about everyone knows about Black Friday; the Friday after Thanksgiving where just about every store is having a sale big enough to make people camp outside the doors. How would you like people waiting at their computer until Midnight just so they can get first shot at buying one of your sale items? Well if you plan it right you can because the Monday after thanksgiving is the etailers version of Black Friday and has coined the term Black Monday (not to be confused with Black Monday referring to the stock market crash on October 19, 1987). Make sure you announce your black Monday sale plans well in advance so potential buyers know to come back. You likely don’t have the benefit of a national ad in newspaper circulars that everyone is looking at after stuffing themselves with a delicious home made dinner Thursday night. However you can get the word out on your huge sale for a fraction of the cost; maybe even free. Start by putting an announcement on your website a week or two leading up to the sale; you may also want to post on any forums that are specific to your industry or niche. If you have a newsletter announce the sale in your newsletter or send out a special edition version of the newsletter announcing the sale with specific details and something special just for newsletter subscribers. You will also want to post your sale to popular sites that cover Black Friday & Monday such as http://www.blackfriday.info/ and http://bfads.net/. Check with any nonprofits you work with what they are doing for the holidays; you might be able to sponsor an event or newsletter in return for a plug about your holiday sale. There are many other options you just have to be a bit creative.

Gift Certificates

Some people are only happy if they pick out their gift so they usually end up with a stack of gift cards and gift certificates after the holiday. Unless you only sell one product then there is a good chance at least one customer will want a gift card for your goods. Of course there are plenty of consumers who buy gift cards for the convenience since it takes out the frustration of picking the perfect gift and you don’t have to worry about anything arriving late. Online gift certificates usually have one drawback over their counter part sold offline; there is something physical to give even if it is just a piece of plastic. You may consider offering a fancy gift certificate page that can be emailed or printed off so there is something physical to exchange; to get some ideas try a Google image search on gift certificate.

So there you go 5 tips for increasing your conversion rate this holiday season by turning site visitors into customers. There are many more and the holidays are a great time to be creative. Have you used any of these ideas in the past? How did they work? What are you going to be trying this year? Share your ideas and thoughts below by leaving a comment so we can all learn together.