People who try and help answer Miva Merchant store owner’s questions and give them options when it comes to purchasing modules are under attack once again.  Vic Vega was attacked on this issue recently as well. A thread I participated on the Miva Merchant users forums was locked, and I wasn’t able to respond to a heinous post by someone known for helping coders and not end-users.  Here is my response with the posters comments indented and bold.

25 minutes after the problem has been solved you tell them to ask for a refund? And you didn’t expect this kind of response?

It was the right response, but did need some more explanation which I have done.  Believe it or not, I didn’t see luray’s response until after I posted.  The pages don’t refresh automatically, so I most likely had the thread open before Luray posted and did my reply without refreshing the screen.

The perfect solution to this “problem” would be to end the MivaCentral affiliate program. It serves no purpose but to funnel money from the developers (that actually add value),

That would not be quite perfect.  Weiland, DesignExtend, sebenza, latu, netblazon, nerdboy, ids, interapptive, stoneedge, among others would need to get rid of their affiliate programs as well.  If they didn’t, people like yourself could still lie about people helping end-users by pointing them to the best solution in their opinion and giving them options.  You would say that someone pointing to Weiland’s site was only doing so because Weiland was paying them.

to people who do nothing but sit here and post single line “buy this” posts all day (which add no value).

I think what you mean to say is this:

“It would be much better for end-users if developers or resellers of modules told them what the best solution was without being able to see all the options available and different opinions.”

 The funny thing is that people like this have no problem with a certain reseller of miva modules who consistently promote only modules available for resale at their site without mentioning options that are equal and many times better for the end-user.  This person just today hijacked a thread where Vic Vega was helping someone and had mentioned that product page templates was the module for the job.  They added nothing to the thread and repeated what Vic had said about product page templates but included a link to their site instead.

I don’t have a lot of time to post on the miva forums, but I try and go there from time to time to make sure end-users know all the options available including the best ones. I will continue to help end-users implement the best solutions based on their needs and what will work the best.

End-users of Miva Merchant v4 and below who were hoping that MM5 would address the problems with the built-in affiliate program will be sad to know that it is still pitiful as ever. Problems that plague every version of Miva Merchant’s affiliate program are the inability of affiliates to view order history to verify proper commission, inaccurate commissions, inability to credit affiliate if shopper leaves and comes back when basket expires, and more.

Multiple developers including ones who create modules have verified problems with Miva’s affiliate program, but one prominent developer claims that no problems exist because he hasn’t seen them. Let’s hope that end-users are smarter than that.

The good news is that Viking Coders Affiliate Manager and Affiliate Login modules fix all these problems for v4 and below. Lets hope Viking Coders releases their affiliate module for MM5 sooner than later!