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 a database-based shopping cart, and 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 may be 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:
When Minivend might not be the right choice and you might want to use another free cart
When to consider a commercial product
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 outnumber the unhappy ones by 10 to 1 or more...)
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.