My switch from MM4 to MM5

[gomblue]

Re: My switch from MM4 to MM5

Brandon -

I've come up with the same conclusions so far.


Remaining question:

Why should new accounts even consider MM under the current circumstances?

[Brandon MUS]

Re: My switch from MM4 to MM5

Miva does has some power behind it. There is a great community (though slowly dieing), and the modules that have been created for Miva already won't disappear magically if the company does.

[gomblue]

Re: My switch from MM4 to MM5

I agree,

But if the company disappears, why would end users want to be part of it? There are plenty of other good carts available on the market.

[Brandon MUS]

Re: My switch from MM4 to MM5

I agree that if the company disappears then there isn't a whole lot keeping end users using the cart, except for the fact that we already are. My stores are so integrated into the way that Miva thinks and acts that it would take us many months of work to migrate to another cart without shocking our customers or our staff (learning new interfaces, losing features, etc.).

While there are a lot of other carts on the market, none of them are perfect and they all have their faults.

[gomblue]

Re: My switch from MM4 to MM5

Do you think that developers choosing shopping carts for clients should avoid Miva?

[Brandon MUS]

Re: My switch from MM4 to MM5

I wouldn't say avoid. I would maybe say careful? If Miva offers what you need it to, then go for it. Compare it carefully to the other shopping carts out there and see which one is the most economical.

[gomblue]

Re: My switch from MM4 to MM5

Brandon,

I'm looking for the cautious answer, but I still think that it would be negligence for a developer to choose the Miva - as of today.

In my case, I have a lot faith in many of the module developers and web hosts. I just don't know if I should choose to move to MM5 or another cart. Obviously, this will be a personal decision.

Thank you for the input.

[JFancett]

Re: My switch from MM4 to MM5

I am currently very happy with our MM5 deployment. It was a little disappointing having to invest about $1000 in modules, but if you look at MIVA as a customizable base with the possibilities only limited by the efforts of skilled developers, it is a nice solution.

I started with MM5, so maybe my view is skewed a bit. I don't know what MIVA used to do for the community. I believe the community when they say MIVA support is suffering as time goes by, but it didn't stop us from deploying the store. I also know HTML, Javascript and some other languages so the learning MIVA's code to get things done wasn't daunting. It's just a new vocabulary, but this community definitely fills in for the spotty documentation. Our store isn't huge but we do about 500 transactions a month. We came to MIVA with existing business processes and a very customizable main product. Our store was developed and deployed in less than four months, part-time by one developer.

Is MIVA an out-of-the-box solution for the average person who knows nothing about HTML, etc? No. But it is very capable to get things done and you'll find that most of the "easy to deploy" cart are quite limiting in features.

If you are totally off MM5, you might look at AbleCommerce. They do a lot of things out-of-the-box that we needed to buy modules for. But keep in mind that when a software package does a lot more for you out-of-the-box you will find yourself changing business processes to match the shopping cart more than tweaking the shopping cart to match the existing business processes.

[gomblue]

Re: My switch from MM4 to MM5

I'm in the process of comparing Miva to X-Cart. I may also pick one other cart to compare with Miva as well.

X-Cart is php based, and it comes with lots of features built in. Definitely more than Miva, and it is less expensive.

I really like the third party module developers with Miva, though. If I didn't, I would switch for sure.

It is pretty clear that customizations would be very affordable and readily available with X-Cart as well.

I hope Miva is listening.