7 E-commerce Destinations for Travel Lovers to Industrious Entrepreneurs

This is a guest post by Joe McDonald, Co-Owner of Durrani Design. Durrani Design, located in Encinitas, CA, specializes in custom website and e-commerce development for businesses of all sizes. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Miva Merchant.

I first started working with Miva Merchant back in 2001 as a freelance developer. Back then, most people’s first exposure to Miva Merchant (originally Miva) was the result of it being offered as a free shopping cart add-on to their hosting plan. Since it was free software, many small businesses began using it without even really considering other choices. Over the years since then, many free open source shopping cart platforms have come and gone; and while many of those original Miva Merchant customers may have jumped ship along the way in pursuit of that mythical perfect free shopping cart, those who stuck with Miva have been the beneficiaries of a mature, solid, well-built platform that has made millionaires of many of those first small business owners.

Now as the co-owner of a growing web development agency, I still consider Miva Merchant our secret weapon to developing fully customized e-commerce stores for businesses of all sizes. We had to really get creative in the beginning to bust the designs out of the box, but the cart has come a long way; the flexibility and functionality now offered with the latest version of Miva Merchant provides unlimited design opportunities. Every shopping cart system has that signature layout that comes pre-installed. It has always been my own personal mission to see how far you can push the development and design. Success is when you look at a website and you really can’t tell what platform it was built on because it’s unique, fresh and most importantly relevant to the client’s specific industry. In business, it’s all about standing out from your competition–to survive you need a serious design running on a serious shopping cart system…a system like Miva Merchant.

Here are a few notable Miva Merchant sites. In the interests of full disclosure, a few of these are fresh off the assembly line of our own little Southern California design agency.

Sauvage Swimwear

Sauvage Swimwear at Sauvagewear.com–the biggest competitor to any online business is plain and simple the retail stores. So when you make the decision to sell online and go head to head with the brick and mortar world, you have to pull out all the stops. For consumers there is a long list of reasons not to shop online: selection, price, shipping costs, availability, trust and security. But an even bigger obstacle to overcome is not being able to touch and feel the merchandise or try things on in person. To win over the hearts and wallets of your shoppers you need a first class online showroom with big bold pictures and lots of product detail. Sauvagewear.com delivers on this experience.

House of Scuba

Houseofscuba.com–a San Diego local beach business that shows the importance of managing your inventory and selection. It’s easy to slip into the chaos of clutter by just dumping every product into a store without regard to organization and structure. It’s important to make sure people can find what they are looking for and still have fun window shopping.

Vizisart

Vizisart.com–While Miva Merchant is an enterprise-ready shopping cart that can handle any size business, it is also streamlined and nimble enough to serve even the starving artists. Vizisart.com is the home of the creative mind of Gregg Visintainer. You can spend hours searching through the shapes and lines of his hand drawn pen and ink artwork. My favorite thing about this site is the balance between the artwork and design. How do you design a great website for an artist selling custom designed artwork? It’s simple…make the website about the artwork and not the shopping cart. The shopping cart should function correctly without getting in the way.

Airverter

Airverter.com–monitor sizes are getting larger every year. When I first started building websites, we were at an industry standard of about 640 pixels wide. Nowadays that size is even too small for the iPad or iPhone. It’s important to build websites that take advantage of the available real estate on the screen. Wider and bolder is the theme at AirVerter.com.

SeV/SCOTTEVEST

SeV/SCOTTEVEST at scottevest.com–as I previously mentioned, it’s important to keep the design of a site relevant to the specific industry. Customers in one industry have different expectations than those of another industry and it’s important not to alienate your audience when they arrive to spend money. Make the design modern but keep things where customers expect them to be. Don’t be so clever that you lose people in the process. It’s about selling product, not about how clever your site can be. Scottevest is an example of how to work within the limits of what travel customers expect to see when they visit a website, while at the same time being modern, clean and up-to-date. If you have banners of an iPad on your home page, that screams “recently updated!” to a customer. Shoppers want to know that there is a real business with real people that keep up with what’s new behind the website.

TheRDstore

TheRDStore.com–the online home of Restaurant Depot, one of the largest restaurant retailers, is also faced with a very niche audience. Restaurant owners and chefs spend 99% of their time in the kitchen and not in front of a computer, so presenting them with 10,000 products to navigate through is no easy task. TheRDstore.com is an example of the importance of speaking your customer’s language. It’s critical to categorize things according to how your customer shops, like calling the “dining room” the “Front of The House” in restaurateur-speak.

LavaCrunch

LavaCrunch.com–demonstrates the importance of maintaining that singular focus without distraction. Even for a store with just 2 products, you need to have the right platform. Whether it’s 2 products or 10,000, Miva Merchant can flex to fit. In the case of LavaCrunch, this online retailer uses Miva Merchant as a way to manage wholesale customers only and a simple public frontend as their showroom. This site shows another example of keeping the design relevant to the product and industry while letting visitors experience the product without a bunch of text & images in the way. We always say, build websites for the customer not the owner.

It’s always exciting to measure the evolution of website design, especially e-commerce. It’s important to know why we make the design changes we do and not to make them just for the sake of design itself. E-commerce websites are different then other corporate “information-only” sites. An online store isn’t the marketing frontend of the business, it IS the business. People aren’t visiting the site to look up a phone number so they can call and learn more, they are buying a product right then and there. If the design is wrong or the site is built on a shopping cart system that can’t keep up, then your business is… well, not a business at all.