Today’s guest blog post comes to us from Mary Weinstein, Account Manager at CPC Strategy

When discussing comparison shopping engines (CSEs), generally merchants find themselves in one of three boats:

• I don’t know about CSEs, or I have limited knowledge of them, and I am not currently using them as a marketing channel.
• I have limited knowledge of CSEs, have products live on them, and manage my accounts infrequently or not at all.
• I have proficient knowledge about the CSEs and I optimize my CSE accounts frequently.

If you’re in boats 1 or 2, this post is for you.

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Today’s blog post comes to us from Miva Merchant Associate Web Developer, Michael Serna

You’ve seen them in your Admin panel under the utilities tab, but what do they do? Custom Product Fields, Custom Category Fields, and Custom Customer Fields can add a degree of sophistication to your store that can help to push you ahead of the pack.

In this post, I am going to illustrate to you some of the many different ways that custom fields can be used to customize your Miva Merchant store.

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Special thanks to Steve Fronek of Ten23Media and Rainebrooke for letting us share information from his recent blog post on this topic. 

Are you using Pinterest to help market your ecommerce business online? Just a few months ago, that question would have likely drawn blank looks from most ecommerce store owners.  As the first month of the new year draws to a close, however it is clear that thanks to a growing user base, Pinterest is growing, and marketers are taking notice.

I was unfamiliar with Pinterest until recently—I had heard of it, but I didn’t really understand what it was or how it could benefit an ecommerce business.  It wasn’t until I saw an article in Practical Ecommerce about this topic, and began to see similar articles appearing in the Miva Merchant Twitter feed, that I began to take notice. 

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Today’s blog post comes to us from Miva Merchant Account Manager, Kimberly Hodel

In the past, we’ve shown you how to add Facebook Like and Send buttons to your Miva Merchant store, and just recently, we spotlighted a blog post from 2010 about how to make a custom Twitter feed for your website.

Well, today, we’re here to take it one step further!

Now that we’ve shown you how to use social media in conjunction with your store, the next thing you want to do is track those visitors. You want to know how your efforts are paying off, and if you’ve gone viral yet, right?  We thought so. Welcome to Google Analytics Social Engagement Reports!

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Today’s blog post was originally published on January 21st, 2010, and is our most popular to date. As a special gift to you, we are presenting the post again with a few extra updates. Enjoy, and don’t forget to leave your feedback in the comment space below the post.  Happy New Year!

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The next Developer Training Series (DTS) starts on February 20th.  The course is free but space is limited.

Miva Merchant Developer Training Series from Rick Wilson on Vimeo.

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This is the second tutorial about how to style the Miva Merchant Category Tree. The first tutorial focused on the CSSUI category tree. This tutorial will walk through the different components of the MMUI Category Tree and show you how to customize it suit your site’s needs.

The MMUI category tree code is much more complex than its CSSUI counterpart. Let’s walk through each part together. Then, I will provide you with a modified version of the MMUI category tree that will make styling it almost identical to the CSSUI category tree.

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Today’s blog post comes from Miva Merchant Associate Web Developer, Zeph Dumlao

When developing for a live store, often times that means editing, adding, and/or removing HTML, Javascript, MivaScript, etc. from the store’s page templates. That’s great and all, but sometimes you want to be able to see your work without affecting the live experience of the customers shopping on the site.

We’re going to show you how you can work on code in a live store while hiding your work from the public at large. To do this, you’re first going to need to create a customer account in the store. The idea is to get the code you’re working on to only show in run-time (the part of your store that the customers see) when you are viewing the page while logged in as YOUR customer account.

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Your store’s navigation is a critical component to the success or failure of your Miva Merchant ecommerce store. After all if your customers can’t find your products, then your sales are going to suffer no matter how good your site looks or what you sell.

Your left navigation or the “Category Tree” as it is called in Miva Merchant plays an important role in providing your customers an easy way to find your products. This blog post is going to show you how to style the Miva Merchant category Tree to have the exact look and feel you need to match your website.

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Working at Miva Merchant, I spend a good percentage of my time looking at ecommerce sites running on our platform. I try to find interesting and well-designed sites to spotlight, visit sites that mention #mivamerchant on Twitter, and of course, I always like to look at sites that our Design Department has launched.

Ecommerce site redesigns can (and should) happen for various reasons.  Other than the obvious clues, (i.e. broken shopping cart, missing images, crazy-complicated navigation, etc.) there are a few other red flag-reasons that signal “redesign time.”

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