The Official Guide to Miva Merchant 4.X (Wordware Miva Library)

Rating:
Summary: Excellent guide to for starters
Review: As a merchant that has no interest in becoming a web guru or techie, I found this guide to be ideal in developing an online storefront and get selling fast.

Those looking for advanced programming tips or highly complex instructions will be disappointed - this book is targeted to the store owner that wants to start selling ASAP. I recommed it highly for anyone that is looking to start or grow a business online.

Rating:
Summary: Essential for Miva merchant store owners!
Review: Do you own a web store? Do you do business on the web?
What of the most sophisticated shopping carts on the web today is that of Miva Merchant.
"The Official Guide to Miva Merchant lists just about everything you would need to know about Miva merchant including how to add product and take orders.
There are of course things that it doesn't mention like SSL security but it enables you to do things with the program you didn't know you could and you can go to their website and get in touch with others who offer third party software to improve the program.
This book breaks everything down so that even the person just starting out can get their store up and running quickly!!

Rating:
Summary: Great book, too bad it's out of print
Review: I found this book to be far more straight-forward than any of the Miva documentation (which is terrible)- kind of like Miva for Dummies might be (if there were such a thing).

Yes, there could have been more helpful insight as to how to get around some of Miva's many limitations, but it sure helped me get up and running quickly.

Unfortunately, this excellent book is apparently out of print. I'd avoid the greedy profiteers up here trying to sell the book for $230+ (Amazon sold this book last year for around $35) and try and find a site that has the PDF version available for download. Do a google search.

Rating:
Summary: Wish I had this book a year ago!
Review: I looked long and hard before selecting Miva as my store software. It is the best system I found but for a beginner its not still not that simple. Then I found this book.

I needed this book a year ago when I first set up my Miva Merchant Store! The manuals from Miva are good but you need to speak 'tech' to understand a lot of what they mean. With this book it was easy. It had me quickly changing my store configuration to what I always had wanted it to be. Each section simply explains how to get functions to work and it even has a guide to the basic HTML commands you need to give your store the look an feel you want. I even found a new way of looking at orders and printing them out that I had never seen with the online manuals. My store was eating up server disk space until this book told me how to delete and pack the customer data files. I retrieved 34Mb of wasted space on my server the first evening!

The bottom line is if you have or are thinking of buying a Miva store package then cost this book into your budget. It will shave months off the learning curve and have you quickly operational with a good looking storefront.

Problem is, now I have opened a whole new urge to reconfigure the whole store with my new found guide book!

Rating:
Summary: Much less than expected
Review: I was sorely dissapointed in this book. I expected an elaboration on the capabilities of Miva Merchant such as most books of this type have. Extensive sections with usage tips, workarounds, hints for implementing some of the capabilites with my business, integrating into an existing web site's design shell, how to move a Miva store to another server, etc... would be expected. This book lacks most of this information. How to integrate Miva Merchant with an existing web site has an entire paragrph - what a joke.

It does explain in excruciating detail every function of the Miva interface which may be helpful to some users, but does anyone really need step by step instructions for using every wizard included in Miva Merchant?

This book does an adequate job of rehashing Miva Merchant's user manual - but that is available for free at the Miva Web site.

I don't mean to come off 100% negative here. The chapter on "fleshing out your store" has a helpful list of things to include in headers and footers. Appendix B - "Design Basics" should be of some help to web design newbies. Appendix C "Payment Gateways" may be of help to those looking to automate payment. Appendix F - "Beyond The Selling Point" has some interesting info, but does not go into great detail.

I like Miva Merchant, but I would not recommend this book to anyone. The Miva Manual is available for free, and there are several books that cover general E commerce and web design better than this.

Rating:
Summary: I Should have listened to the disappointed ones
Review: If you have "any" computer experience at all, don't waste your money. You only should buy this if you are Thinking about miva merchant, this should be a sales tool not a reference tool. I have not found anything of any use in this book SAVE YOUR MONEY
this isn't an investment its only an expense.

Rating:
Summary: Have the two 1-star reviewers actually even opened the book?
Review: Until I got this book, I spent many, many hours writing emails to my web host and to Miva -- all trying to figure out what I was supposed to do to get my web store going. I tried using Miva's documentation, but let's be honest here: there is a huge amount of documentation to sort through, and not enough hours in the day.

I got this book after it was recommended to me by several Miva Merchant software developers in the Miva support groups. I've not been disappointed. I'm wearing out the binding from constant use. The edges look like the backside of a porcupine from all the Post-It tabs I've added while using it. I call it the "Miva Merchant Owner's Manual," and I firmly believe Miva should have included a copy of this book with their software! (hint, hint)

This book doesn't attempt to teach Mivascript programming, and it isn't a Miva encyclopedia. What it IS, is a straightforward guide to setting up and running your Miva Merchant store. I only wish I had bought it to start with. All those wasted hours I'll never get back... don't make the same mistake I did -- buy this book BEFORE you start setting up your Miva Merchant store.