Forgotten Passwords and Usernames

Miva Merchant customers, like all of us, forget passwords. Some people don’t want to reuse passwords across sites for security reasons, but it’s hard to remember a different password for each site you visit. Miva Merchant comes with the built-in ability that lets customers have their passwords resent to them. But if they forget their username, there’s no way to recover it. A great addition that solves this problem is the Login / Username Lookup module from Sebenza.

This module adds the second form you see on this page, that asks a customer to enter his email address, and then emails them their username so they can login.

To make it even easier, let customers simply use either their username OR their email address to login. This is accomplished with the Email Address Login and UserName Lookup module from Emporium Plus. It’s very simple to install – just drop in the module and then change the field labels on your form so that customers know that they can use their email address. Here’s an example of a customized login form that uses this module:

Allowing Customers to Stay Logged In

Many customers would prefer not to have to log in each time they visit your store. The default behavior of Miva Merchant is to log customers out of their account when their basket expires. However, by setting a cookie on their computer, your store can automatically log them back in each time they return. This is accomplished with Remember Me by NetBlazon. Remember Me puts a checkbox on the account screen and login forms, and if the customer checks it, it sets a cookie on their computer. Then, when they come back, if the cookie is still there, they are automatically logged back into their account.

Welcome Your New Customers

It’s also a great idea to welcome your new customers, by sending an email when someone creates a new customer account. This email can contain their login information to help them remember it, and it also serves as a inbox-reminder of your store in general. You can do this by installing Welcome and Forgot Password Email by Sebenza. In addition to giving your store a welcome email, it also lets you customize the email that gets sent when a customer retrieves their lost password.

Miva Merchant has a bit of a bad reputation as far as SEO goes, but that information is extremely outdated. (Read about more Miva Merchant myths at MerchantTutorials.com.) Miva Merchant 5.5 is search-engine friendly, and you can improve on that even more bad adding in modules for specific things.

Short Links

Miva Merchant 5.5 has built-in support for short links. Short links are links to your category and product pages that don’t have querystrings and parameters in them, and that theoretically are also short in length and contain keywords. Although the built-in support is useful, adding a module offers additional features – such as having short-links without any “indicator” of whether the URL is a product or category, or offering the ability to use something other than the product and category codes as the base of the URL.

Even Google’s Matt Cutts says that keywords in the URL help with SEO efforts. So if your product and category codes aren’t keyword-based, being able to use a custom field (containing your keywords separated by dashes) for the URL can be extremely helpful. For this need, you can use Smart Links for SEO by NetBlazon (us). Another third-party module for short links is Ultimate SEO Links by Sebenza.

Page Titles

One of the most important parts of your site that you should optimize for SEO are your page titles. According to SEOmoz, “Title tags are the second most important on-page factor for SEO (behind content)”. Your title tags should be descriptive, information, and unique – that means a different title for EVERY SINGLE PAGE! Miva Merchant 5.5 allows you to customize the page titles for each page type, and to use variables such as the product name within the title. For even greater control at the individual category/product level, try our Page Title Manager PRO module.

Site Maps

All of the major search engines now support XML-based sitemaps that allow you to tell them the URLs to every page in your site, how often they change, and their importance relative to all other pages in your site. The sitemaps can be submitted to the major search engines either through their webmaster tools (or site explorer for Yahoo!) or they can be updated by pinging certain URLs with the address of your sitemap file.

There’s no support for XML sitemaps in Miva Merchant, but there are several add-on modules that can do this:

• Ultimate Feed Generator by NetBlazon (us)
• Template Data Feed by EmporiumPlus
• Moogle by Phosphor Media

Customer Reviews Modules

Reviews modules are wonderful for SEO because they give your site unique, user-generated content (“UGC”) that search engines love. There are some great modules for customer reviews, including Ultimate Product Ratings and Reviews by Sebenza and Rate This by EmporiumPlus. Miva Merchant can also have PowerReviews integrated with it, though this requires some custom coding on your page templates.

So with a little bit of money toward modules, and some quality time working on your site and content, you can have a well-ranked Miva Merchant store across all major search engines.

Coupon Redemption by Emporium Plus

Probably the oldest coupon module on the market today, but still being actively developed, is Coupon Redemption by Emporium Plus. Coupon Redemption has lots of features, including:

• Search function for coupons within admin
• Import coupons from flat file
• Autogenerate coupons
• Assign coupon code as a series for affiliate purposes
• Instant coupons on product pages
• Percent or fixed amount off
• Limit coupons to certain products/attributes
• Require a minimum order before coupon can be used
• Can limit coupons to one per customer
• Free Shipping coupons
• Limit coupon use to a certain state, zip code, or country
• Statistics on coupon use
• Easily wipe out all expired coupons at one time
• It’s compatible with Google

The thing that is most different about Coupon Redemption, as compared to other coupon modules, is that the customer doesn’t have to click an extra button to “apply” the coupon. Instead, it’s applied when the checkout page it’s on is submitted (to go to the next checkout page). The good thing about this is that it makes it hard to customers to think they put in their coupon code when they really didn’t. The limitation is that only one coupon can be applied to a given order during checkout. (Multiple “instant coupons” from product pages can be applied, though.)

Here are some screenshots of Coupon Redemptions admin interface:

Ultimate Coupons by Sebenza

Ultimate Coupons by Sebenza is a flexible module that allows multiple coupons of many different varieties:

• Coupons at checkout – flat-rate or percent off
• Free shipping coupons
• Instant product coupons
• Group coupons – associated with a price group or availability group
• Sub-coupons – dynamically-created coupon codes
• Multiple-use, one per customer, or one-time use coupons

It also display coupon usage statistics, and includes features such as start and end dates, the maximum discount allowed, the minimum subtotal required to use the coupon, and the ability to associate a coupon with an affiliate account. Like Emporium Plus’ Coupon Redemption, Ultimate Coupons is also compatible with Google Checkout.

Screenshots:

Coupon codes are applied to the cart by clicking a separate button from the “Continue” button.

Coupons by Viking Coders

The Viking Coders Coupons module is a relative newcomer to the Miva Merchant 5 module market, but Viking Coders actually has one of the most popular coupon modules for Miva Merchant 4. Although I haven’t used this new one, I imagine it is at least as feature-rich as their MM4 version.

This coupon module supports these kinds of discounts:

• Percentage and Flat Dollar Discounts
• Free Shipping
• Product and Category Specific Coupons
• Discounts For the Next Ten Shoppers to Use a Coupon
• Coupons for Availability and Price Groups
• Coupons for Specific Customer Accounts
• Discounts Based on Ship-To Checkout Information

Coupons can be set so that they cannot be used in conjunction with other coupons, or you can allow multiple coupons per order. Coupon codes are applied to the cart by clicking a separate button from the “Continue” button. The Viking Coders module also tracks statistics on coupon usage.

The following screenshots are from the Viking Coders website:

Which module do you use and how well do you like it? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

• Payment modules, such as the check, COD, and credit card gateway modules
• Shipping modules like Flat Rate Shipping and Weight Table Based Shipping
• Fulfillment modules that send emails to the merchant and the customer when an order is placed
• Many more

In addition to the built-in modules, you can also buy modules from Miva Merchant themselves and from a number of third-party developers in order to add new features to your website. If you want to offer coupons, sell gift certificates, extend the templating system, or do hundreds of other things, you need look no further than the module aftermarket. You can even code your own Miva modules if you need a feature that doesn’t currently exist. There are also a handful of free miva modules around by several different developers.

This site is about helping to expose the Miva module market to potential and new users, and also to serve as a resource to existing users. We also aim to increase the exposure of the Miva Merchant <a href=”http://www.mivamerchant.com”>shopping cart</a> across the Internet. It is, after all, our favorite piece of software!