Miva Corporation offers merchants and software
developers a complete line of products to build, manage, and operate virtual storefronts.
Miva was founded in 1996 and today is a leading provider of merchant e-commerce software
to small and medium-sized businesses.
The Miva product line includes:
- Miva Merchant as a storefront development and management system. It integrates catalog,
product, fulfillment, maintenance, category management, shopping cart, order processing, and
credit card processing in association with many of the Miva payment providers, including Authorize.net, Cybercash, and several
others. Merchants use a browser-based interface and can extend or customize the system
using Miva Script (an XML-based scripting language). Miva Merchant offers the ability to
custom configure processing modules, such as payment gateways and shipping routines, which
integrate with Miva Merchant.
- Miva Order is a transaction-enabled order form designed to meet the needs of a merchant
who has a limited number of items to sell. Merchants simply incorporate a link from the
existing web page where their products are sold thereby permitting customers to seamlessly
access the order form and make purchases. Merchants are able to create and manage custom
product order forms with provisions that simplify the process of calculating sales tax,
shipping costs and currency formatting. Miva Order has five built-in payment processing
options:
- Simple credit card validation
- CyberCash
- CyberSource
- Cardservice International
- Verisign
How Miva Works
Miva Merchant 3.0 provides merchants with all the features of previous versions of Miva
Merchant, along with new merchandising capabilities for store promotion, integration with
Intuit QuickBooks and additional controls over the look and feel of the storefront.
One highlight of the system is the related products feature that allows merchants
to feature complementary products and accessories associated with individual items for
cross-sell opportunities.
Miva Merchant 3.0 is also integrated with QuickBooks from Intuit Software to enable
merchants to better synchronize customer and product information between their online stores
and any brick and mortar storefronts.
At the heart of the Miva system is Miva Empresa, an interpretive engine for the Miva
Script programming language that is the core technology behind Miva''s e-commerce products.
Empresa is a server-side program that acts as an interpretative engine for Miva Script, an
XML-based programming language that is the core technology behind all of Miva''s products.
When running Miva Merchant, it is necessary for the Web server to also run a copy of Miva
Empresa in order to interpret the commands. Miva Mia, a free downloadable version of
Empresa, is available for personal workstation use, such as testing a store before uploading
the store to a Web server. A Miva API exposes Empresa for customized database queries,
function enhancements to merchant server processing, and additions of custom processing
through modules.
Miva Empresa is available for a variety of Web commerce servers, including:
- Cobalt RaQ 2, 3, and 4
- Windows 2000
- Windows NT
- UNIX (various implementations including Linux)
Miva also provides a number of venues for users to discuss Miva products. These forums
are monitored by Miva technical support to help users with problems and questions. Forums
are accessible through majordomo at the Miva Support section of
their Web site.
Fees, Costs, Etc.
The Miva Hosting Bundle at eazyaccess.com runs $39.95 per month, plus fees for processing
credit card and check payments.
For those wishing to purchase the system, Miva Merchant is licensed on a per domain basis
plus a license fee for additional storefronts. The basic domain license comes with a license
for one storefront; additional storefronts can be purchased separately. Initial Domain
Licenses, which include the first store, are $495 per domain. Additional store licenses,
under the initial Domain License, are $99 per store.
Miva Empresa is licensed per Web server with no per domain or per user fees. Licenses run
$495 per server. Miva Commerce Server is a bundle that includes a single Web server license
to install Miva Empresa and a single domain license to install Miva Merchant. A license,
which includes Miva Empresa and Miva Merchant, runs $895 Per Server/Domain.
Recently, Miva and Cobalt teamed up to provide Miva Commerce RaQs as pre-installed
and pre-configured server appliances. The system includes Miva Empresa, a web server plug-in
for XML based Miva Script, and Miva Merchant. The system is designed for hosted and
dedicated e-commerce storefronts. Pricing is as follows:
- RaQ 3i - Dedicated Edition list price is $2,599
- RaQ 3i - Hosting Edition list price is $5,799
- RaQ 4i - Dedicated Edition retails for $3,199
- RaQ 4i - Hosted Edition retails for $6,399
Miva Commerce RaQ systems many be purchased through Cobalt or any of their distributors,
including HostPro and
Interliant.
All Miva products come with a 30-day money back guarantee.
Overall
Miva offers a variety of affordable systems to fit any budget or hosting preference that a
merchant might desire. They also make it simple for those merchants to scale their systems
up as their business grows without porting their storefronts to entirely new environments.
Pros
Miva software is affordable, easy to use, and flexible enough to support most any type of
online merchant. Because of their history and market penetration (over 60,000
installations) it''s likely that Miva will be around for some time in an otherwise crowded
merchant server space. Miva has also developed a network of hundreds of Value Added
Resellers (VARs) throughout the world.
Cons
Critics of Miva Merchant charge that the security of downloading order and payment data
could use improvement.
Links:
Reviewed by: Mark S. Merkow, CCP
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