Many e-commerce packages available today provide some search capability out of the box. These out-of-the-box search utilities typically are good for searching through product names and description. Some even provide advanced capabilities to search other fields or order the data in some unified fashion - like showing you categories of interest, related products, and more. Read more

For web development purists, the holy grail of coding an ecommerce site using an off-the-shelf package is the ability to write a fully standards-compliant site. The upcoming Miva Merchant 5.5 release brings this desire into full reality for Miva Merchant developers. Version 5.5 offers a completely-open page templating system, where all aspects of the site are fully customizable at the HTML and CSS code level. Read more

URL Rewriting is a way of changing the URLs within a website to a more logical and/or more search engine-friendly format. The default URLs within a Miva Merchant site are long and full of querystring variables, and can easily be rewritten to cleaner formats, as described below. To find out if this is available for your website, check with your web host. Read more