Your store front is your gateway into your Internet Store. The look and feel is up to you but make sure your customers can find what they are looking for without having to do a lot of searching.

Miva Merchant is a browser based store front development and management system integrating cataloging, product, fulfillment, maintenance, category management, shopping basket, order and credit card processing. It does this without all the custom work which would be required if you were to design from the ground up.

The website New Hampshire Restaurant Guide is an example of a custom design database system which took over 400 hours to design and actually incorporates multiple websites for management, data update, and visitor access. A store front or shopping cart development system would have been difficult to fit into this design thus the custom work with 50 programs and a relational database.

Miva Corporation www.miva.com has a demo store front which you can visit and try out. This demo was created using only the Miva Merchant. It is ideally suited for store fronts and catalog sales allowing the web site to accept orders on-line and pass the credit card processing information to the credit card merchant of your choice.

Your store front does not have to reside on a secure server, only your payment system does. If you use a credit/check processing service where the payment system resides on their server and you do not need any confidential information from your customer, you do not need a secure server at all.

If you want a simple store for a couple of products or you have a product or service which does not lend itself to a store front package, cgi scripts can be written in place of the store front but it might cost less for the store front package then custom written software. With the credit card processing service, a store front package is not necessary. Without the store front package, you will need some sort of database to store your customer information.

When designing your website, your store front package may dictate your layout for the other parts of your site. Most store fronts do not lend themselves to custom design too well and do not allow modifications to the pages at all except through the administrator. The reason for this is simple as your store front information is really data in a database and does not reside as web pages. Thus there are no pages to modify. In order to incorporate custom work into the store front, you either have to modify the storefront program itself or incorporate custom modules into the store front application.