LemonStand (Discontinued) vs. Miva

• Good alternative to Shopify and similar services.
• More than basic template adjustments will require programmer hours.
• If you want a slick store with great features LemonStand's for you.

Incentivized

If you are familiar with online retail, you will find it easy to use and love the diverse way of arranging your store and products. If you are brand new to online retail, Miva Merchant has partners that can help you design the perfect present that is easy to maintain.

• LemonStand is cloud based on AWS.
• You get: Instant deployment whenever you choose to publish, automatic software updates, Site-wide SSL, and PCI/DSS compliant infrastructure.

Incentivized

• General versatility, though changes commonly require the aid of a true Miva developer to implement
• Compatible with many payment gateways and a fair assortment of third-party services
• Developers employed directly by Miva to handle merchant projects are personable and responsive to most requests

• LemonStand has a limited number of templates. Each template has a different set of features that can be modified in the back office theme customization area.
• LemonStand claims their templates are highly customizable. To accomplish this, they expose individual web page code in page templates and widget blocks. These are windows into the template where you can modify, add and delete html code. However, as in all PHP/CSS/HTML templates, even those written with Twig as LemonStand templates are, the coding goes very deep through many files. I don't think it would be cost or time effective for a small company to attempt more than superficial customization. This is pretty much the same for Shopify and PrestaShop. As a store front and blogging platform, LemonStand is elegant but it is not a website development tool like Wix, Weeble or even Squarespace.
• LemonStand manages this expectation with excellent email support. There is no user forum and no third party templates for LemonStand, and this is a good thing. When I wanted to modify a specific aspect of the template, I emailed the issue/question to LemonStand support and consistently received advise including instructions on how to adjust the widget or exposed page code to resolve my problem.
• Documentation is out of date and could use a good proofread. Videos and tutorials are too simple to be really helpful.

Incentivized

• Training and documentation. Miva Merchant is fairly complex, and while they continue to make good progress in providing resources for all levels of expertise (beginner to expert), there are still a number of gaps. To take the step beyond the initial levels of online storefront requires expert assistance for most businesses (unless they have some substantial IT/technical resources available).
• Market for add-on and add-in products. (Note: this is significantly biased by our own business experience selling workflow and feature products for Miva Merchant.) The long-term goal for Miva has been stated to essentially involve having integration partners (selling their time) and larger companion product partners (selling products that work with, but usually NOT within Merchant). There is clearly a gap of potential customer needs that they are attempting to build into the core platform. Of course, no one can cover all needs! While Miva Merchant is not hostile to third-party product companies, neither do they have an explicit place in their long term roadmap. It is my opinion that their strategy of minimizing third-party add-on developers may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and I shudder to imagine a time when all significant features only come from the developers within Miva. As good as they are (quite good) they suffer from the inevitable myopia that ALL companies have - they are NOT their customers!

Miva Merchant works! It is a stable platform, it uses many standards and when it does break, typically due to database corruption, if you know a little about SQL or have a Miva support package, repairs are typically minutes away Vs. hours or days.

Miva Merchant allow individual of various skills to create the perfect online store! The wizards inside Miva Merchant that has step by step allow someone with little or no programming skills to a skilled programmer who can customize to his or her heart content.

I work with multiple Miva sites daily, and uptime is fantastic. Outages are rare from my experience, and any issues have generally been short and handled quickly.

An overwhelming majority of the support technicians are top-notch. One or two key exceptions stand out, but even those are typically fine - just occasionally wrong or unhelpful. Overall I seem to get quick and useful support, whether it's for the software or a web hosting-based need.

Creating the Miva store originally took a reasonable amount of time, 2-3 months, but we were unable to migrate our orders and customer accounts from the old platform. Additional refinements were required over the following 6 months to refine the functionality and features so that they worked properly for our store and fulfillment process.

I looked closely at every e-commerce product I could find.

• LemonStand had very high satisfaction from current users.
• Email support is polite, accurate and fast.
• Company is located in Canada.
• Refund policy appears to be ethical.
• Shopping experience is sharp! I like it a lot.

Incentivized

BigCommerce, Shopify and Shopware are all superior to Miva. They allow you more power to personalize, power your store, and better B2B options. They have all solved the issues that Miva has with categorizing and subcategorizing products, which Miva doesn't allow that creates issues with duplicating subcategories, duplicate keywords and canibalization. Miva isn't mobile first, mobile friendly, the other sites are.

Miva has proven to be a great solution for smaller mom-and-pop stores through large enterprise-class businesses with tens of thousands of products. Performance is just as strong on enterprise-class stores as on considerably smaller stores, and an increasing number of marketing/sales tools are continually being added to the core Miva functionality to keep up with current marketplace demands.

• I expect ease of use and mobile look and feel will increase customer sales.

Incentivized

• We have lost some business due to lack of easy MIVA connectivity with popular POS systems.
• For the most part, focussing on MIVA as the primary eCommerce platform my company offers has been very positive choice for me and my clients. The choice of MIVA has allowed me to focus on learning a singular platform where I have the ability to modify the look & feel as well as the function of the store. For my clients, MIVA presents an easy to use administrative interface (Magento, by comparison, is a nightmare) with plenty of functionality.