How to keep your Miva Merchant store running well

The key behind keeping your Miva Merchant store running as well as possible is to stay on top of the maintenance for your store. This means packing your data files and emptying expired shopping baskets within your Miva Merchant store.

Miva has direct documentation on how to do both of these in the Advanced mode. You can view this by visiting http://www.miva.com/docs/merchant/howto41/MM1060.pdf . By packing your data files on a consistant basis, the miva databases files are compressed and many error messages that occur in the Miva administrator are avoided and fixed.

In case you do not have a PDF reader, you can follow the steps below to pack your data files and delete your expired shopping baskets:

1) Log into your Miva Merchant administration.
2) Expand the "Stores" menu by clicking the blue triangle next to it.
3) Expand your store's menu by clicking the blue triangle next to your store's name.
4) Expand the store "Utilities" sub-menu.
5) Click the link: "Delete Shopping Baskets" and a new screen will be displayed:
Delete: Expired or All - By choosing "Expired," you will only delete those shopping baskets that have been abandoned by shoppers. By choosing "All," you will delete ALL shopping baskets, including those that are currently in use on the store.
6) Once that is complete you can click "Pack data files" which is also under your utilities toolbar for your store in the Miva administrator

Matt-
You may also want to remind people that for larger sites it is a smart idea to first put the store into maintenance mode before packing the data files. This will prevent the accidental packing of the basket list (viewable only through OpenUI) while a customer is currently checking out and thereby corrupting that area of the database. If this happens, it's a major pain to fix and no orders will process until it is.

Maintenance mode, then deleting ALL the shopping carts will guarantee this not to happen.
Bogie

Matt & Bogie,
Thanks for the tips. I have been doing this on a weekly basis for all 5 stores I have running and haven't had any issues since this. Before doing this, people would get Shipping Errors. This does help a great deal. The only question I have is, I have not applied any patch fixes since I opened the stores last year (March 2003). My Questions are:

1. Are there any major Patch Fixes
2. If so, can HostMySite Admin apply them ?
3. If so, when can I schedule downtime to perform this ?

Thanks Much !
Tony

1. Probably - if you let us know what version you're running we can find out (or just give us your domain name - is it webcreators.tv?)
2. Of course!
3. Whenever you wish, though we recommend sometime between 12 noon and 8 pm EST, M-F, as that is when MIVA is open and it's always nice to have them around in case something goes horribly awry during the upgrade/patching process.

Hmm...now where's my $0.50 for using the word 'awry' in a sentence?

Hi Jamie,

I'm running Versions 4.16. The stores where I'm running Miva are:

1. http://www.townadvertiser.com (aka placeadd.com)

2. http://www.startcleaning.com

3. http://www.janipro.com

4. http://www.atabron.com

Thanks for your help with this.... You guys rock !
Tony

Tony,

I'm still on vacation till Tuesday, so I sent an email to support asking them to work on the upgrades for you tomorrow.

Jamie

Awesome !
Thanks Jamie ! Enjoy your vacation... I see your like me... On Vacation, but still love logging into the forum to check the new Posts ! LOL

Thanks again !

Tony

I hope those upgrades went well for you Tony. With every upgrade of the merchant product, the upgrade product becomes more and more seamless; especially in comparison to how it used to be.

Hi Matt,
sorry, just read your post. Yeah, everything is running perfect. Thanks again ! I just posted a question about 4.23, but it sounds like its going to cost us $299 bucks for this upgrade. Just want to know the benefits before forcing it on my customers... thanks..
Tony