Miva Shopping Cart

Offering your products and services for sale online has gotten easier, cheaper, and much more user friendly over the last year - especially with our new Miva Merchant shopping cart (contact us for pricing).

There are a handful of basic steps you need to follow in order to get started with online sales:

• Select A Shopping Cart: Once you have signed up for a web hosting account you can order your Miva ecommerce shopping cart - just contact us. Your Miva cart will be installed shortly, and you'll be ready to begin setting up shop, adding products - everything you need. Miva Merchant has a complete set of wizards to simplify the process of building your store. The browser based administration interface provides access to an array of more sophisticated tools to maintain your catalog. Upsell merchandising and order fulfillment are included. And Miva's modular architecture gives you almost unlimited customization for your storefront. You can also accept PayPal with Miva.
  Miva Details and Help Page
  
  If you are not looking to take credit cards online and wish to sell products or services via check only, take a look at our Alacart Shopping Cart option.

• Get a Merchant Account and a Payment Gateway: Merchant accounts allow/authorize you to take credit cards. You can find an enormous number of companies online that will set you up with a merchant account, prices vary. Our advice for the last couple of years... when anyone asks us about merchant accounts or credit card authorizers is, "Go to your bank first." You have an established relationship with your bank, your bank wants your continued business - your bank can even have better prices versus online. Seems hard to believe but not everything is cheaper online, we've seen many of the heavy up front fees lowered by working with a bank. Not only can they get you connected with the merchant account provider but they often have their own relationship with an online processor like Verisign or Authorize.net, and once again they may be able get you a better deal than going directly to the company's web site.
  More Info on Payment gateways and Merchant Accounts
  
  
• Add Secure SSL (HTTPS) Capability: In order to take credit card information from your customers you will need to have secure order and cart pages - pages beginning with "https" and having that familiar "lock" in the lower right corner of the browser window. All hosting customers have FREE access to the use of our server secure certificates - see SSL Security for more details.