MiniVend is a full-featured shopping cart with high-end power. It can and does maintain databases of hundreds of thousands of items or more, and is frequently used in catalogs with hundreds or many thousands of items.
MiniVend is database-based. It has a complex implementation and a fairly steep learning curve. If all you are ever going to catalog is just a few items, and/or the items will not frequently change, MiniVend is probably overkill for your needs. It may make more sense to go with a simpler cart that embeds the product information in the page and does not require database setup.
Things that might call for the use of MiniVend:
hundreds of items or more
many different catalogs maintained by same organization
product offering will frequently change
need for programmable product display
need for complex ordering interaction
delivery of soft goods after real-time charge of credit cards
need flexible searching and categorization options
When Minivend might not be the right choice and you might want to use another free cart
only a few items
items will not change much
When to consider a commercial product
you want power, but want to interact only through a site building system like MS FrontPage or Netobjects Fustion
you want to interact only through a GUI like Windows and not edit files
When comparing MiniVend to commercial products, the comparison is better drawn to the higher end ones costing thousands of dollars rather than the low end ones costing hundreds of dollars.
Subjectively, people have both good and bad experiences with MiniVend.
After investing tens of thousands of dollars and almost
a year of effort in commercial software, we switched
to MiniVend and were operational within weeks.
-- large corporation
MiniVend is too difficult for the user to configure. There
are too many things that must be gotten just so.
-- Small internet service provider
I really like the new site, its laid out well and the
documentation is so good I've decided to use it even though
I'm not a programmer.
-- happy prospective user
Your documentation is awful.
-- not-so-happy prospective user
Your documentation is some of the best and most comprehensive
we have seen for a freeware program.
-- happy user
And the your pages don't have the right information in
them and that's MY FAULT? How about the fact that your
configure script acts differently every time it gets run?
-- not-so-happy user
(Obviously, mileage varies with the user. Thankfully, the happy ones *seem* to heavily outnumber the unhappy ones...)
One user says:
-- MiniVend is an electronic commerce development environment;
*not* a shopping cart.
This is not far from the truth, though modifying the ``simple'' or ``basic'' demo seems to work for many users.
Despite being free, MiniVend will require an investment -- either your time or the money to engage a consultant skilled in the web and in databases. If given its due, MiniVend can provide power that no other free shopping cart has.