Hi all,

If anyone has any questions about Miva Merchant then I'm happy to help you out. I've been using Miva for a LONG time now (amongst others) and am glad to offer any info I can about using, building, modules, etc...

Bogie
Bogie Design, Inc.

Bogie,

I will take you up on your offer. Have been building basic sites for a while, but now onto a new adventure of adding online shopping. I added MIVA to my hosting account to "play" but still very much a novice.

These may be basic (or stupid) questions but I am overwhelmed with where to start:

1) Do I need to have a SSL certificate or if I add the payment module does that provide for secure payments?

2) I would like to have the MIVA site look like the rest of the site, so as to be transparent to a visitor that they are now on another site

This should be enough to get me started...again I appreciate your assistance and any additional tips you can offer to get me started would be appreciated.

Mike

Hi Mike,

Actually your secure cert is provided by HMS on a shared cert unless you have a dedicated server with them. As long as HMS did the install of Miva on your shared hosting account, the ssl is already in place and you need not worry.

With regard to your second question--that takes a little more "ummph" and may be a little too generic a question to properly answer here. Basically, You want to look at your miva store in three sections: Global Header, Global footer, and everything in between.

Keep in mind that your ecommerce site is not a "regular" website. Every page on the site will feature the "Globals" so keep consistency in mind. The "in-between" stuff is mostly filled in by the dynamics of the Miva system, as long as you have gone through all the options available in the miva administrator menus and kept your settings as close as your original design as possible with regard to colors, links, buttons, etc...

I understand that it is easy to get confused if you are just starting out, but Miva is a great tool for the "out of the box" beginner or the seasoned professional. It is very scalable and i would highly recommend you keep playing with it and see the results you get from certain actions. just try not to get too fancy in the beginning.

if you want a few examples to peek at, look at Shavers.com and Blanketbarn.com. Both were made with Miva 5.5. Blanketbarn is a relatively simple build with regard to Miva in terms of complexity and features, while Shavers.com is extremely complicated, using multiple modules and tons of custom configurations, but with either you can see the 3-part layout I mentioned.

I hope that helps a little.

Bogie

Bogie,

I am just starting to get back into this and again thank you for your insight. I am lucky in the sense that the storefront I need to build has just a few categories and less than 20 products. I'm sure you will be hearing more from me as I progress.

Than again,
Mike