Although these are static html pages, they have direct links which allow customers to add the products to their basket which is maintained in your Miva Merchant shopping cart system. If you are using the CIM Inventory Manager or Miva Corp's new Inventory Manager (in Merchant 4.x), it will even check the stock level and return an out of stock message if stock level is depleted. ** Caution: If you are using Merchant 4.0 and its Inventory Management system that deducts products from inventory when they are placed in the basket, you should select to NOT use the Add to Basket buttons if you have one-of-a-kind items. The reason for this is that some robots and other indexing software may even follow links which contain the ? and & characters. This could result in the stock level decrementing to zero and out-of-stock emails being sent. The products won't be removed from inventory completely, as they will be re-stocked when you run the Admin:Delete Expired Shopping Baskets. This undesirable situation does not exist in Merchant versions 2.x or 3.x. It is also not a problem in Merchant 4.x if your store does not use the Miva Corp Inventory Management or your product stock levels are not likely to be depleted with one or two passes of the indexing program.

The store owner determines which page the customer will go to when they select to add a product to the basket. They can be taken either to the basket for review or back to the static page they just selected from. Both processes are automatic and do not require Javascript or meta refresh routines. Either click through destination can be used on either of the sort options, store owner choice. In addition to the functionality of this module, it provides an excellent example of how to interface static pages with the Miva Merchant system with return to the correct static page.

Quick links on each sub-page allow the customer to return to the index or go straight to their basket for review and checkout.

Below the sub-pages the store owner can even generate individual product pages. These product pages contain the full sized image and description. If the store uses the Flexible Product Description module and the product record contains a Keyword field, those product specific keywords are added to the store's generic keywords which are already in all of the static pages.

The store owner can decide whether to display the price for each item on the static pages. Since these pages are static and cannot function interactively to determine customer price groups or discounts, the hide price routine has its place. However, if the store has no price groups and discounts are calculated on basket totals or discount coupons, the price listing is useful.

The static pages also have no way to restrict access. So if your store is one which does not allow certain products to be shown to all customers, then this module is not for you, unless you can place all of those restricted products in specific categories. In which case, you could then sort pages by category and simply delete those categories' pages.

This module is for Miva Merchant 2.x, 3.x and 4.x. It works with both the Miva Merchant look and feel (mmui.mv) and the OpenUI look and feel (oui.mv). If using the mmui.mv, there are two edits that need to be made to the mmui.mv file.

StatCat produces pages similar (mirror) to the layout in Miva Merchant with admin control. The following configuration settings are made within the standard Miva Merchant admin interface: Page title, home URL, optional title/store logo, title background color, title foreground color, category title header size, number of product columns on the category sort page, Meta description of the site, Meta keywords on the site, return action after adding a product to the basket, option to hide the prices, category column background color, category column foreground color, category column font, category column size, product background color in the category sorted pages, product foreground color in the category sorted pages, product font and size in the category sorted pages, optional display of thumbnail images in the category sorted pages, store front page welcome screen, search button input, product descriptions on category pages, and page footer.

Once generated, the index pages can be linked to your main home page. The catalog can be left in the directory it is generated in or copied to any web site (or multiple web sites) to increase search engine visibility. The links to images and back to your Merchant.mv store will work across servers. An example of this remote distribution can be seen at my Yahoo/Simplenet web site. The limitation to the remote distribution is that these remote static pages are one way, ie. placing a product in the basket will take the customer to the main Merchant.mv, but not back to the remote static page. They would then continue shopping in Merchant.mv. This limitation exists only if the static pages are not in their original catalog directory. If they are in the catalog directory on the local server with Merchant.mv, then return to the static pages is one of your options in admin.

Note 1: StatCat uses the first letter of the product name to name the sub-pages. If you use illegal characters for the first letter of product names, you will not be able to generate the by-name catalog. An example would be the left bracket, as some might have put the font tag at the beginning of the product name. If that is the case, use the by-category catalog.

Note 2: If you have an excessively large products database, you will probably not be able to run StatCat on a server without timing out. However, you should be able to run it in MivaMia if you have a mirror of your store on your PC. You would then need to upload the static pages manually. This store of 600 products took about 5 seconds to generate the category pages.

Example static catalog pages

• Sort by name
  • This example has the add to basket button disabled
  • This example goes to Merchant.mv for individual product screens
• Sort by category
  • Click through remains at the merchant.mv basket (alternatively you can have it return to originating static page after addition)
  • This example contains StatCat generated individual product pages