ProductCart 3 v. Miva Merchant 5

I haven't done a transfer but know a tiny bit about Miva as I checked it out pre ProductCart.

For me downloadable products was absolutely vital matced to flexible categories and previewing the music.   I checked out Atinic etc which supposed focus on these but they didn't compare to PC well.   I must have demo-ed 20 or so packages without any exageration from opensource packages to full on large e-commerce packages. 

Miva in v5 doens't do downloadable products so it wasn't an option for me.  Even in version 4 it was a mod a third party did rather than integral to the product.

Aspects that concerned me about Miva were:

1.  Looked very complex in configuration with extra tool kits etc although this made it very flexible.

2.  Seems to feature a lot of extra paid additional modules, rather the core components.

3.  Like you, I couldn't really get to grips with what actually it was.

4.  The experience time to market for set-up / config in the forums seemed longer than I was aiming for.

These are only perceptions and being here, I ended up with PC so I'm bound to have a partial view.   There are of course viable alternatives to ProductCart, some of which looked more viable for my use as alternatives.

Rather than do a sales job here for EarlyImpact, if you need any experiences or thoughts of strengths / weaknesses feel free to email directly.

cheers

Mark

I 've used Miva 4 (plus ton of OUI modules) since 2000. It's not flexible in term of customization even with the Miva5. I am looking for to migrate to either PC or VP-ASP. I prefer the ASP-based systems because they are open source, furthermore PC offers many essential built-in features which you have to purchase if you use Miva. The only thing hold me back at this moment because PC hasn't offer a Customer feature (Available group) which is very important to me as well other PC users AND that is also the ONLY reason that I still stuck with Miva. I am in search for a third party plug-in for using with PC, the minute I found that solution, I will dump the dinosaur-technology Miva at once. If I had a chance to start all over, I will go with PC. However if you decide to go with Miva, then I have a full new copy of Miva5 license for sale at $350.00 ($995.00 at Miva) plus 4 hours to help you setup & Config. + Storeman ( a third party app. which is very help ful for Import, Export, Edit Cat/SubCat, Products, Attributes, options; worth around $300.00). But as I stated, PC is a far better product.

Hi Uniforms Guy: we definitely encourage you to play around with the new "Pricing Category" feature in v3. This is one of the features that takes ProductCart a huge step forward in version 3. We spent a lot of time on it, and we use it actively ourselves on our software store to manage reseller pricing (we have different levels of resellers).

http://www.earlyimpact.com/demos/standard/pcadmin/AdminCusto merCategory.asp

Use the built in help (little yellow icons) to learn more about individual features. Basically:

• You can have unlimited pricing categories and assign customers to them
• You can set up a pricing category so that it also gives "wholesale" priveledges, which in ProductCart means payment options not available to retails customers, tax-excemption, etc.
• You can override the price set by the pricing category (e.g. 10% off all products) at the individual product levels (e.g. "Gold Customers" get 10% off everything, but 15% off product XYZ, and 20% off product ABC).

Hi Mark,

An "Available Group" feature will let us pre-defined a group(s) of customers who are authorized to buy a certain group(s) of products. Other customers might be abale to view those products but not be able to buy them

For example, I sell Uniforms. I supply Uniforms for FedEx and UPS employees. I would like the PC provides:

when the FedEx employees LogIn (after SignUp), the PC will let them purchase the FedEx uniforms category/products but not the UPS category and/or UPS products.

By the same token, when the UPS employees logIn, they will be able to purchase their particular UPS uniforms, NOT Airborne-Express or FedEx uniforms.

I hope I didn't confuse you,

Mariot

Getting back on the topic, I've been reading and playing with demos more.

I have some questions about PC for you guys:

1. I see how Miva uses its StoreMorph technology to allow you to edit the look and feel of the pages. How is changing the look of PC accomplished? I know it's CSS-based, are there templates somewhere too?

2. I recently found
TheSimpleLeaf as an example of a real PC store, and think its one of the best looking sites I've run across, period. I'm really curious how they made the "Shopping Bag" showing the # of items and a total in the right hand column. I don't recall seeing a feature like that in the admin panel of the demo store.

Is it something that can be easily relocated around the page?

3. I may need to use some sort of freight shipping because some of the products I am considering selling are heavy. Has anyone had to use something like this, and how did you add it to the program?

4. How easy or difficult is it to find an ASP developer familiar with the program? And how easy or difficult would it be to have modifications made, if they were required?