Miva Merchant

Miva Merchant,Inc is a privately held ecommerce software and hosting provider with headquarters in San Diego, California and offices and a data center located in Tampa, Florida. Miva Merchant provides ecommerce software hosting, web development and design and related services to tens of thousands of small and medium-sized online businesses.
History
Miva Merchant, Inc was originally founded in 1996 as HTMLScript Corporation, an early tag-based Web Scripting language development company. In 1997, HTML Script introduced KoolKat, a catalogue-based ecommerce shopping cart product.
Following the success of KoolKat, HTMLScript Corporation changed its name to Mivain 1998. The name “Miva,” according to Joe Austin, one of the original founders, comes from the hieroglyphic name for “cat,” a picture of a bird and a milk basin and pronounced “Me Waa.” The tie-in to ecommerce, says Austin, is that the word “cat” is a common abbreviation for “catalogue.”
Miva, Inc experienced significant company growth in the years that followed, continuing to develop its ecommerce platform, which was renamed to Miva Merchant, and in 2002, the company switched their underlying programming language from an interpreted language to a compiled language and released the Miva Script Compiler as well as Miva Merchant version 4.14.
In 2004, the company was sold to publicly-traded pay-per-click marketing company, Find What,Inc which changed its name to Miva, Inc. The original Miva, Inc became a division of the company called Miva Small business and this structure remained in place until 2007, when the company was purchased again, this time by a team of people which included some members of the original Miva,Inc management team. The new company changed its name to Miva Merchant, in order to differentiate itself from MIVA, Inc.
Today, Miva Merchant, Inc continues to provide both ecommerce software and ecommerce hosting to hundreds of thousands of online merchants. Since the debut of KoolKat in 1997, the company has sold over 300,000 product licenses.
Software
Miva Merchant, Inc’s core product is its ecommerce software, designed to be scaleable and customizable, and running on the company’s proprietary scripting language, MivaScript. Miva Merchant Empressa, the underlying script engine for Miva Script, is available for most operating systems.
Hosting
In 2009, Miva Merchant, Inc began offering a hosted solution directly to end merchants, and in 2011, the company acquired Hostasaurus, previously the largest independent Miva Merchant host.
Chase Instant Store Front
Beginning in March of 2011, Chase Bank began promoting Miva Merchant through a national radio and print campaign for a product known as Chase Instant Storefront.

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