if i wanted to offer my clients miva on ecommerce hosting like some other hosts do how does that work what licence would i need to buy

Whatever option you take, its going to be very expensive. If you think a lot of your clients will want to use it then contact Miva for a special rate on bulk licences as they are extremely expensive by themselves ($695+).

or if your just looking for a ecommerce solution for your clients, oscommerce is free :)

osCommerce may be free but can you use it for your new-to-the-web clients? We all know it is powerful and feature rich but can a small business use it without investing loads of time or hiring someone else?

As for miva, if you just want one license is is rather expensive but if you are interested in offering it as a service the per-license fee goes down dramatically. Miva has a list of prices on their site and you may want to search this forum for information on the licensing costs/benefits.

Miva is an excellent package and is definitely worht it if you have the money to spare.

If you become a partner you will get the licenses for around 100 each. That is what they work out with hosting companies, call and talk to Patrick, he is my sales contact. Nice guy.

LCSHost, you got a contact email for Patrick?

Thanks.

plawlor@miva.com

They have made some changes to their partner program since I last talked to him. Mention LCS Technologies referred you.

i think oscommerce is better. it does everything miva or anything else can do.

Originally posted by lcshost
plawlor@miva.com

They have made some changes to their partner program since I last talked to him. Mention LCS Technologies referred you.

Thanks. I'll tell him you referred me :)

os commerce, doesn't hold a users hand and it also has horrible templating system. I find that 99% of users who even want a shopping cart are novices. These are the people who don't want to do anything and want a wizard to walk them through it. The miva people "just get it" while the os commerce programmers seem to be a group of geeks who don't have a clue about the end user. OSCommerce is great if you know what you are doing, but then most of the people who know what they are doing don't really use shopping cart systems in this manner.

:D

Slightly off topic, but regarding Miva:
I have a client that I do misc stuff for, not hosted by myself, that is having some strange errors with orders through Miva. Some orders, not all, are being processed by authorize.net, thru paymenttech, but are not sending the order thru for the client. Buyers cards are being charged, but miva doesn't show a record of the order. This happens every so often. 3 or 4 days everything is fine, then a days worth of orders are lost, but clients billed. Authorize says it's a host side issue, WestHost says it's an Authorize.net issue, and Miva says nothing.
How many have experienced this problem? They upgraded to the latest 4.20 in an effort to resolve this, but no luck. Any Miva experts around?

if oscommerce isnt that user friendly, is there anything out there that is even close to miva?

Let me add my 2 cents...

I have used Miva for about 4 or 5 years now. Make no mistake it is a good product. Make no mistake their licensing is very expensive.

I recently had a client that really couldn't afford the licensing fees. We might have pulled it off, but it would have cut into my profit. I looked at Agora Cart (which I find is a joke), and Interchange which I am convinced MUST be ran on a dedicated server with root accesss (just my opinion).

I signed up for a Dathorn account (which is GREAT btw). They have OSCOMMERCE built in. I started playing with it, and the did a demo for the client - who sells about 150 motorcycle accessories. The client was BLOWN AWAY at how cool OSCOMMERCE was! It had some features over and above what MIVA offers - such as ranking the top-sellers, search by manufacturer, USER REVIEWS - things you find in high-end packages.

I think OSCOMMERCE is GREAAAAAAAAAAT! It is user friendly 'to some extent'. I don't recommend a 'newbie' set it up. I don't recommend using the CPANEL install either (outdated in most cases). However once it is setup, it is not rocket science. The setup can cause some goofy programming issues, images not displaying, sendmail problems, etc., All things you would expect if a 'non-technical person' sets up any script.

But once it is up and running.........WHEEEEEEEEW! It is awesome. I was a die hard MIVA guy for a LONG time (still am!), but this takes the cake now that I know what I am doing.

For local customers, it is good - for hosting customers the newbies will have problems. However I will say the oscommerce.com website is very detailed, and if you can't eventually figure it out - you shouldn't be using ANY shopping cart IMHO.