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MIVA Merchant 5 Online Help
If you are familiar with MIVA Merchant 4, you will notice many changes in MIVA Merchant 5. Some features are entirely new and some are improvements on existing features. Some tasks are now automatic to help your store run more smoothly. The information below explain how to take advantage of these new features.
MIVA Merchant is cleaner, clearer, and easier to use. Better organization enables you to get your job done more quickly and easily.
MIVA Merchant offers unprecedented flexibility and power with template-based store pages. Design elements and store components can be placed and formatted exactly to your specifications.
Many features that support store customization save each update in version history. This gives you the freedom to play and experiment with designs or save a collections of themes, with the security of knowing you can revert to any other version.
Populate your store with products and upload your contact management database to your online store via flat files.
You may use MivaSQL (included) or MySQL.
MIVA Merchant software updates are now made available for your selection and automated installation. You will receive notification of new upgrades and can choose to have any of them installed now, later, or not installed at all. The new MIVA Merchant streaming update technology will take care of transferring and installing the updated MIVA modules.
Streaming software updates will not affect store customization or any third-party modules you may be using. In most cases it will also be possible to roll back to the pre-updated state.
Product options can specify an increase or decrease in shipping weight. So if you offer granite pedestals with your origami sculptures, now you can calculate the correct shipping charges.
In past versions products would remain in baskets even after they had expired. Items were only restored to your store's active inventory when you deleted the expired baskets. In MIVA Merchant the items are made available again immediately when the basket expires.
No more recovering unused order numbers. Once an order number is assigned to a basket, it cannot be reused. This keeps your orders in numerical order. There will be skipped numbers (as before), but they will be in sequence.
It is still good practice to delete the expired baskets, to keep the database size reasonable.
There is no longer a need to pack data files. With the new SQL-based databases deletions are final. There are no records "marked for deletion" taking up space in your database files.
News from MIVA Small Business will no longer accumulate on the main screen of the administration interface and you are no longer required to delete each message. Notifications used to be downloaded to your store. Now there is a small area at the top of the screen viewing live and up-to-date content, with archived information available on the MIVA Web site.