When you delete your expired shopping baskets, you have the choice to recover order numbers or not. When you delete orders, products and categories, and otherwise perform certain tasks in Miva Merchant, these items are only FLAGGED for action. ALWAYS choose "do not recover order numbers". If you choose to recover old order numbers, there is a possibility that your store's database could become corrupt as well as being confusing when you start receiving orders that are out of sequence.

Tip 1:
One of the most important maintenance routines you can perform on your online store is Deleting expired Shopping Baskets and Packing the Store's Data Files. When you delete orders, products and categories, and otherwise perform certain tasks in Miva Merchant, these items are only FLAGGED for action.

HOW OFTEN? For highly active & large stores, consider doing this every day. For smaller and less active stores, at least once per month. This "housekeeping" procedure tightens up your store's database to avoid data corruption and optimizes your store for optimal speed. This procedure must be performed regularly!

Click here for easy instructions on how to optimize your ecommerce store's database.

Tip 2:
To remove a button (and hyperlink) from your store's navigation bar, insert the following path in the corresponding text field: graphics/admin/blank.gif

Tip 3:
Always include the correct 3 character file extension on shopping cart images that you upload to the server. Files with no extensions (.gif or .jpg) will not show up on the page. And never use a space in a file name as these images may not show up on all browsers. (file-name.gif, file_name.jpg, and FileName.gif are all acceptable but file name.jpg is not)

Tip 4:
Just because you understand does not mean your customers do. You know your online store. You made the decisions about how it works, looks and feels. It's probably easy for you to navigate your own store. Throw your knowledge out the window.

Make the second assumption: This is the customer's first time shopping online.

Use The Resources. You don't have to spend thousands of dollars to make shopping online easier for your customers. Miva Merchant already includes many essential tools to do just that.

Headers/Footers - use these to tell your customers what to do now or next, or to explain "screens" and their purpose.
Customer Email Notification - this is the last thing the customer sees before receiving his or her order, so make it count! Include vital information, including contact info.

Detailed Product Descriptions - tell them too much about the product; the more they know about what it is, the quicker they can decide if it is what they want

Use Links - for information pages, privacy policies and contact information, you can use HTML pages. Link to them often. If you don't, customers will assume you are trying to hide something

Do Your Research - There's thousands of eCommerce sites on the Web, so there's no excuse for you not providing an easy-to-navigate Website. There's nothing wrong with getting ideas from other sites (and nixing ones that don't make sense).

Accessing your store using AOL:
Some store managers have reported that they receive an error when trying login to their store using AOL. Miva technical support reports that if you have problems of this nature, use a Web browser such as Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer to login to your store. These browsers can be downloaded for free from Netscape or Microsoft. If you are using a Proxy server, try dialing in instead.

Why do buyers or store managers sometimes not receive a confirmation of their order placed on my Miva Store?
This problem arises when you set your store's confirmations to be sent from Customer's email address. Yahoo, AOL and other ISPs are trying to cut down on spam and sometimes the orders get returned because the ISP THINKS the order is spam, even though it is not.

In your Miva Merchant store admin, under your store's name/order fulfillment/Email Merchant Notification (either the standard module or the OpenUI module) always use a From e-mail address on your domain name not a Hotmail or Yahoo address or an address on a 3rd party domain. And never use the "Send Merchant Email Notification *From CUSTOMER's EMAIL ADDRESS*" option - Always check "other" and use someuser@YOUR_OWN_DOMAIN.com.

How do I retrieve order info from my shopping cart so I can run the credit cards?
Log in to your store using your login info that we sent you. On the navigation bar on the left:
1. Click down the triangle next to 'stores'.
2. Click down the triangle next to your store.
3. Click down the triangle next to 'Order Processing'.
4. Click down the triangle next to 'unbatched orders'. There are your new orders! Easy!

How can I get a copy of my batched orders from my store's database for backup purposes?
Log in to your store using your login info that we sent you. On the navigation bar on the left:
1. Click down the triangle next to 'stores'.
2. Click down the triangle next to your store.
3. Click down the triangle next to Utilities.
4. Click on "Export Orders To Flat File".
5. Select the batched orders file that you want to export from the dropdown menu.
6. Use the default database file to be saved as it appears. (orders.dat)
7. Click "Export". Easy!

Your batched orders will be saved to a secure area on our eCommerce server that only our Unix admins can access. Contact us with the name of your store's exported .dat file and we will email it to the store owner. Later, if you choose, you can export an additional orders database file as "orders1.dat", or put in your original file name (orders.dat), click "append", and your new batch will be appended to the previous database file. Once you receive your orders.dat file, open them in a spreadsheet program like Excel. Easy!