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Miva

Score7.5 out of 10

29 Reviews and Ratings

What is Miva?

Miva Merchant is a point-and-click, online store development and management system that allows merchants to build their online store through a web browser, and lets developers provide aftermarket enhancements for the online store.

Categories & Use Cases

Top Performing Features

  • Bulk product upload

    Admins can upload products in bulk using spreadsheets.

    Category average: 7.5

  • Mobile storefront

    Customers can easily shop on mobile devices; storefront is responsive or mobile optimized.

    Category average: 7.9

  • Multi-site management

    Administrators can manage multiple storefronts or websites under one umbrella.

    Category average: 8.1

Areas for Improvement

  • SEO

    The platform & templates help users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.

    Category average: 7.7

  • Inventory management

    Includes tools or integrations for managing inventory.

    Category average: 7.8

  • CMS

    Beyond product catalog, includes basic content creation and management features such as blogging capabilities.

    Category average: 7.3

Would Not Recommend. Beware of Terms and Conditions and Difficult User Experience

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Miva is our website platform. We have hosted on Miva for over 10 years. We are B2B and B2C and use Miva to list and manage our products. We do not use Miva to track or show inventory. We have to use Advanced Shipping Manager to manage how package shipping weights are broken down and displayed.

Cons

  • Search
  • Category and Sub Category Organization
  • Communication
  • Transparency
  • Customer Service
  • Speed of Answering Tickets
  • Speed of Resolving Customer Issues

Return on Investment

  • Negative impact on our traffic
  • Negative impact on our growth
  • Negative impact on our ability to make changes to category organization
  • Negative impact on checkout due to abandonment of their three page checkout

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Commerce, Shopify, Shopware and BigCommerce

Other Software Used

NetSuite ERP, Celigo, Slack

If your looking for best-in-class B2B eCommerce features.. look no further.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Miva to drive our eCommerce engine for our B2B operations. We have used it to bring our ERP system to our customers in a way they can interact with that is familiar and comfortable. Miva has been a groundbreaking change to how we are able to do business. We have many business units, each working with distributors or agencies in different ways, on top of a large support staff that manages orders. Since we have so many locations and different workflows, we needed something that was flexible. We evaluated many solutions when looking for a platform that could scale with us, and Miva was the clear choice and winner. One of the main drivers of that was the ultimate ability to customize the platform to work for our business and scale. You can adjust and edit all facets of the customer experience and a large number of the backend connections that just wasn't an option in many other platforms. Offering customized products to a different customer base was another headache that we were able to solve easily with Miva. Miva supplied us with the necessary toolset to create great websites.

Pros

  • Customization of the platform is limitless
  • External API options via XML and JSON
  • Easy to learn and program (PHP, JQuery, etc)
  • Solid Architecture - Reliable
  • Invests in the platform for the future

Cons

  • Native Integrations
  • Mobile App
  • Passwordless Login / Wallet

Return on Investment

  • Ability to add new websites rapidly
  • Standard language for our ERP to talk to one platform
  • Customization has enabled more return customers

Alternatives Considered

BigCommerce, Shopify, Shopify Plus and Volusion

Miva is the sweet spot for mid-size companies who want better than off the shelf!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Miva is the backend sales platform for our websites. They provide a very modern front end for our retail and wholesale customers as well as many integrations to automate our processes. One of their key strengths is customer support, so I've had a great experience working with them and our outside development team addressing our specific needs and functions. If they don't already have a module you can add on, they can either build it, or there are many outside development teams who can tackle the problem for you. The support staff at Miva are incredibly knowledgeable and US based, so an answer is always delivered in a timely manner, and probably with deeper insight than you'd ever expect! Miva works with their customers at such a personal level that I feel comfortable reaching out to any number of people at their company from the CEO all the way down and can expect a human response!

Pros

  • Customer support
  • Customization
  • Documentation
  • Flexibility
  • Integrations
  • Usability

Cons

  • Wholesale sales

Return on Investment

  • We started during the pandemic so any ROI data is impossible to justify

Alternatives Considered

Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Adobe Commerce (Magento Commerce)

Other Software Used

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise, Orderbot

Review from a "non-tech" business owner

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I'm not your typical "tech-savvy" online retailer, so you're going to want to read this review. I'm the target audience for Wix and Shopify, and I have chosen not to use them. This is why: Our company has used Miva Merchant for our online retail presence for over 20 years. It's easy to use, especially considering my degrees are in psychology and absolutely nothing to do with tech. Their tech support is insanely good compared to other companies. They answer all of my questions, even the dumb ones. And there a lot of dumb ones. I need the versatility of Miva Merchant for the look and feel of the website almost daily. I have a very rudimentary "web" background from the 90's-early 2000s when my parents owned the company. Since I've only recently re-entered this company when my parents retired, I'm way behind the curve on what I can do (but I am constantly learning). This is where Miva Merchant really shines for me. I want to be more independent with caring for the upkeep of the website. Miva Merchant has tons of guides on using their platform, but the engineers and techs at Miva Merchant are willing to help and have made my experience jumping back into online retail a breeze. To be honest, I've looked at other platforms like Shopify Plus and Wix. It's just not what we need. We have so many product lines and recently added a wholesale line. I need a platform that's tailor-made for retail and this works for our small business. We're about to completely overhaul the look and feel of the website and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else when this happens. If I had to pinpoint one aspect of why I have chosen to stay with Miva Merchant, it's customer service. They don't farm it out. I can call or email 24/7 and I get immediate service. I never call them and get a foreign company with impersonal, handbook-driven customer service. I will emphasize that point especially if you are 1) new to online retail or 2) upsizing your online presence.

Pros

  • customer service
  • tech support
  • diverse retail platform

Cons

  • some integrations are limited or difficult (apple pay, etc.) but I have not found these to impede the functionality

Return on Investment

  • SEO is easy to navigate and adjust

Alternatives Considered

Shopify Plus and Wix

Other Software Used

PayPal Payments Pro, Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Google Ad Manager

Easy for Beginners to Use, Powerful Enough for Larger Businesses, Flexible Enough to Meet Specialized Needs

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I'm a software engineer, not a merchant. I've been working with Miva for more than 20 years. My specialty is writing plug-in modules that customize the store's behavior. Miva Merchant is extremely versatile and flexible. It's quite powerful and easy to use out of the box, but modules can do anything you can imagine to enhance your site and streamline your workflow. A module can change the way your products are displayed, provide special fees or discounts, and modify shipping costs. It can connect to other servers to upload or download data, so you don't have to do it by hand. I'm not aware of any other e-commerce package that can beat Miva in this. The company is big enough to be stable and reliable, but small enough that they treat customers like real human beings. They have some very smart people in charge, and the top executives even answer my emails personally (although I'm careful not to abuse the privilege). There's also an active user community, and a set of Web forums where experienced users answer questions for newbies. The company also participates in these.

Pros

  • One of my clients sells online professional training courses. I wrote a module for him that lets customers take their exams on the Web site. It saves their work, computes their score, and even prints out a diploma when they pass.
  • Miva Merchant has built-in support for the most common payment processors ( PayPal Authorize.net, etc.) and shipping carriers (UPS, FedEx, Post Office, etc.). But if you want to use one that they don't support, I can write you a module for that. Or I may have one already that will work for you; I've written a lot of them.
  • Miva Merchant isn't just for online shopping. Some merchants use it to handle telephone orders, or for purchases in their brick-and-mortar stores. I've written modules to help with this.

Cons

  • As a software engineer, I find their technical documentation to be sketchy and hard to use. But that's only a problem for those of us who write modules or do other deep dives into the internal functioning.

Return on Investment

  • It's been the main focus of my business for 20 years