Miva Reviews

I have used many different e-commerce shopping carts from both the buyer side and the user side, and Miva is hands down the best, most configurable and easiest to use.

There are other options at a lower price point that are good to get started, but when it comes time to get serious - Miva is the go to.

Getting orders online.

Miva has been a solid platform. It is stable and moderately easy to use. We have a complicated business model with many requirements. There is a growing number of developers that can build out needed features for our success. Wholesale pricing levels for multiple customer groups.

The best part is our Customer Success team. Justin and Wayne have been great to work with. When I do not need management-level assistance, the ticket system Miva uses is staffed by REAL PEOPLE who are good techs. I have not had to wait for days and battle AI or bots or people working with English as a second language.

Justin and Wayne worked to resolve all my concerns. They coached my team and me for growth and suggested tasks we could do ourselves to avoid costly developers. Once we re-signed our contract, they were still present and following up with us regularly to make sure we were making progress and volunteered to be a resource with scheduled calls to go over account details and training. The excellent support and dedicated representative gives our team much more confidence!

They are expanding many features and addressing the pain points we have as a growing business.

I regret that we did not regularly engage with the customer service team when we first started. Some of the desired features need plug-ins or custom programming. There are a number of good private contractors that have been able to assist and do what we cannot.

Product updates are easy. We have to update prices from distributors on a weekly basis. Whether it is a handful of products or hundreds, Miva is easy to use. The website is stable and quick. Unlike other platforms, it is not so locked down that we cannot customize it for our needs. Miva representatives listen to our concerns and have worked some of those concerns into new solutions and fixes. I feel valued as a customer.

Miva Merchant's best trait is its adaptability to cater your website to whatever experience you want to share with your customers. With Modules, Plugins and intuitive backend experiences, with the recent inclusion of a GUI based page builder, those with limited programming knowledge can build intelligent, well-designed pages. For every roadblock we’ve encountered, Miva has been able to provide us with a solution.

Besides MivaScript being a unique quantifier for finding Web Design assets that can work on the Miva Platform, I have no downsides. That can, at times, cause problems in finding reliable resources quickly.

Miva Merchant has allowed us to reach both B2C and B2B customer bases efficiently while enabling us to market specific product sets to the customers that are interested in them.

The platform is just what we need for our ecommerce requirements.

Cost is a little more than we had hoped, but the convenience and I believe the increase in sales because it is so easy to use for our customers.

Our old platform was off-line a lot and was not real user friendly. Miva has been a great upgrade from our old platform.

Miva Merchant is very flexible. It's simple and inexpensive enough for startups, and it has the capacity to adapt as a business grows. Best of all, its API allows it to be customized. If you have an unusual requirement about how your products are displayed, how shipping costs are calculated, how you hook up to 3rd-party services, etc., Miva can support it. There's an active community of free-lance developers who can provide a solution for you. The company's customer support is better than most; and there's an active Web forum where users help each other. I've been working with Miva for almost 20 years; it's a good community to be a part of.

Sometimes their tech. support people don't provide the most helpful answers to my questions. I think it's because the company is growing; sometimes my questions are answered by newly hired people who don't have a lot of experience. To be fair, being a software engineer myself, the questions I ask are usually tough ones. At least they respond quickly; I never have to wait more than a day to get a reply.

Truth in advertising: I'm one of those free-lance developers that I mentioned above. I've written software modules to customize the store in hundreds of different ways: specialized shipping-cost calculations, unusual types of payment processing, special handling for international orders, data exchange with 3rd-party services, etc., etc.

Miva offers a highly scalable platform with the ability to customize your store however you wish.

Our website www.loveisarose.com has been using Miva since 2001 and we have no plans on switching. Our niche products require lots of options and personalization and Miva has been the perfect platform to provide the right solutions for our website.

Their customer support is great and super responsive. I've never had an issue they could not resolve promptly.

The Miva Community Forums are also a great resource for any questions you may have or info you may need. There are tons of users and developers that are always willing to help and share their knowledge.

Now for the Miva Goodies.

Customization / Developer Features:

-MivaScript

The proprietary MivaScript is a very powerful tool for rendering dynamic content.

Can be used at the global, template, and even customer level allowing you to create a very personalized shopping experience.

Assign global or local variables to be used globally or at the local page template level.

-Theme Components

One of my favorite features. Includes, Images, Banners, Content Sections, Product Listings and Navigation Sets.

This is so great because it allows to you have pieces of content or code that can be edited in one place and applied to as many pages on your site as you want.

Create as many navigation elements, product listings, content sections, etc. as you want and dynamically or permanently render them in the page templates you want.

A great feature for rendering supplemental navigation on small screens such as related categories.

-Template Branches

A highly effective way to make changes to your store without affecting current visitors.

Create a branch by copying your existing store (copies all templates, css and js resources)

Edit the new copy of your store until your heart is content and even start working on a redesign.

Preview your changes easily before going live. Great for troubleshooting.

Push the changes live and easily revert back all within the admin.

-CSS/JavaScript Resources

Easily manage CSS and JS files directly in the admin.

Assign all CSS or JS files to a resource group (one for CSS one for JS) and set the order in which they are rendered. Allowing for all CSS or JS files to be output as one file in the client's browsers.

-Page Templates

Create as many custom page templates as you want.

Create Alternate copies of product and category templates and assign them to certain products or categories.

-Global Settings / Elements.

Edit your store's global Head, Header, Footer, MiniBasket, Breadcrumbs and more all in one place.

Store Owner Admin Features:

-Product Attributes (Options a customer can select such as color)

A very powerful tool to help when a product may have several variants such as size or color.

Have a lot of products that use the same attributes? Create an attribute template that can be assigned to as many products as you wish.

The Attribute machine template allows for great customization as well. Maybe you have a product that can be personalized with up to 30 characters and one that can only fit 10 characters. You can dynamically show a different text field based o the product code or sku.

-Product Copy

Have a bunch of new products you're adding to your site?

Are they similar to an existing product?

Copy the existing product with a simple click of a button and make the necessary changes after it is copied.

-Product Filters

Also known as facets, these are an online shopping standard.

Assign / exclude certain filters to certain categories or products.

Year, Make, and model (combination facets) are available.

-Built in SEO Features

Easy to use uri management for creating SEO friendly page URLs.

Easy to use sitemap generator.

Easily edit all Meta tags, Title Tags for every single page on your site.

Built in product Schema.

-Built-in Google Analytics Eccomerce Tracking

-Great Inventory Management

-Highly customizable Shipping Methods.

Flat Rate, Weight Table Based, Price Table Based and more.

Assign different methods to different countries, states and even zip codes.

Limits shipping methods at the product level.

-Easy Integrations with Shipping/ Order Proccessing Platforms such as ShipWorks or ShipStation.

-Review Baskets

View customer shopping carts in real-time.

This is helpful when a customer calls who is having trouble checking out.

Help finish the order with a simple click of the Create Order button.

You can also Shop as a Customer if you'd like to see where the confusion might be on the specific page they are having trouble with. This is useful for identifying checkout hurdles.

-Order Processing is very easy and straightforward with many payment gateways available.

-Authorization Failures

A list of all authorization failures allows you to follow up with any customers having trouble placing an order.

Also great for identifying fraudulent carding attacks.

-Price Groups / Availability Groups

Great features for creating separate pricing or only showing products for customers.

Allows for wholesale pricing.

-Marketplaces / Template Based Data Feeds

Easily Manage products on shopping platforms such as Etsy, Amazon, Ebay and Google Shopping

Have a more custom set up? Create template-based data feeds for Google Shopping/ Merchant Center and any other platform that uses a data feed for product information.

There is much much more but I think I have hit all the important features we use on a regular basis.

There is not much that I don't like.

-The real key is learning the proprietary Miva Script

If you wish to do some customized dynamic rendering that Miva doesn't already ship out with the default Shadows Readytheme (Framework).

Luckily Miva has a lot of literature online to help you learn if you are up for it.

There are plenty of developers and programmers on the Miva Community Forums that offer Miva Services at a very fair rate.

-A few more ReadyThemes to choose from would be nice but Shadows is quite nice out of the box.

Anytime I contact support they resolve the problems with minimal issues and get it done promptly.

I think I have covered the benefits under What I Like.

Business benefits are continued growth and scalability.

Miva has great customer service. They were there to help with all of the integration we requested.

I don't have anything at this time. Miva has been amazing to work with.

Miva has integrated perfectly with Zinrelo to provide us a nice rewards platform.

We have depended on Miva since 2005. Miva's shopping cart has the functionality and flexibility we need to grow our business. Their uptime and security are outstanding. Most importantly, they have the best customer service I have ever experienced. Their team of computer professionals is knowledgeable, creative, and always willing to help,

Support for third-party integrations can be frustrating. They need to improve the way they handle interface issues.

Choose Miva for quality and reliability. You provide the glitz

Miva's functionality and reliability let us focus on website content and delight our customers. Our business is ten times larger than when we started.