Notes from the 2008 Miva Merchant Conference

I've been the last 4 days recovering from jetlag and decompressing from the 2008 Miva Merchant conference, held last week at the Marina Village conference center in San Diego. I felt pretty lucky to attend this year, because it had been 4 years since NetBlazon had attended, and 5 years since I had personally made the trip. It was WELL worth it. The conference started out with a social hour of finger foods and cocktails on Thursday night. Our clients who attended didn't make it into town for this event, leaving me with a lot of time to wander around. I met a lot of new end users and developers, and became re-acquainted with people I'd met five years ago. It was great to get the lay of the land.

Friday morning began with breakfast, followed by a series of keynote addresses. First up was Russell Carroll, who talked about the state of the company and the product. This conference was the first time I had met Russ, and I got a really good feeling about his expertise, background, and dedication. After Russ finished, Rick Wilson presented the roadmap for Miva Merchant 5.5, and gave us a demo of the new product.

The roadmap brings several new features, and really positions Miva Merchant to compete with every other major shopping cart on the market. The new features that will be built into Miva Merchant 5.5 from the start are:

• An updated look and feel for the administration tool, focusing on click efficiency
• A built-in CSS wireframe for the customer-facing screens
• Skins
• Dreamweaver integration
• Opening up previous hidden parts of the system for customization - attribute templates, emails, etc
• SEO improvements

Additionally, there are a number of updates scheduled throughout 2008, to be offered within the streaming update process that has been a part of Miva Merchant 5 all along. These are:

• Improved shipping modules for FedEx and UPS (Q2)
• A single-page checkout (Q2)
• Configurable error pages (Q2)
• Resolution of an existing issue with product stock being tied up in expired baskets (Q3)
• Attribute-level inventory (Q3)
• New UI components: breadcrumbs, mini-basket, and pagination links (Q3)
• Soft Goods (electronic downloads) (Q3)
• Coupons, discounts, and gift certificates (Q3)
• Session-based affiliate program (Q4)
• Upsale changes, full store backup, and improved import/export features (Q4)

Once Rick finished outlining this plan, he showed us the new product, particularly the admin. It is amazing. They did a great job of keeping it familiar, while simultaneously offering the usability and layout that one expects in 2008.

Next, Tony Perre talked about Miva Merchant Payments, a merchant account and gateway that is being included in Miva Merchant 5.5. It will also be available to stores going all the way back to 4.0.

After that, we moved on to other vendors, and heard from Matt Watts about Paypal and Express Checkout, and from Michael Burke about Google Checkout. Tying up the morning were Brett Crosby, one of the founders of Urchin, who talked about Google Analytics and Urchin (and showed us lovely pictures of his childhood and wedding!), and Tim Ash from SiteTuners.com who discussed landing page optimization.

Unfortunately the breakout sessions were of a little lower quality than the ones I attended 5 years ago. The ones presented by Miva employees provided a good overview of certain topics (CSS, Dreamweaver, skins), but with one notable exception, the non-employee speakers spent more time promoting their services than providing really useful information. I think this is due to the attrition suffered by the Miva Merchant community over the past few years - many of the stronger voices have simply disappeared over the years. Hopefully the breakout sessions will be better next year.

Personally, my favorite part is the people. Miva Merchant has a strong third-party developer community. Module developers, integrators, and site designers mingle and interact almost as though there's no competition. It's so nice to be able to share ideas and accomplishments, without the high level of "IP protection" you find in many communities. I also was able to reconnect with a couple of current clients - people I talk to several times a week, but haven't seen in person in years. And I made a lot of new connections. I always come away from the conferences with a sense that I've gained a new group of friends, and that's the best part.

I think 2008 is going to be the year that we see Miva Merchant take off again. It's exciting to be a part of it.