Author: Kalicia Bateman
LAST UPDATED: June 27th, 2019
Miva is a company that produces an e-commerce platform for small- to large-sized businesses. They believe in building scalable e-commerce solutions that are scalable and can meet each individual business's unique requirements. They offer the following: PCI compliant e-commerce, free SSL certificates for the first year, and custom site and development solutions. Since 1997, Miva has done more than $100 billion in online sales.
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The Good
- Subscriptions
- Themes
- Pricing and payments
- Checkout pages
- Reporting features
Subscriptions
With each Miva subscription level, for example, you can get a limited number of email addresses for different departments and decision makers within your organization. While many other providers offered a subdomain with the platform's domain name, you get a free domain name with your Miva subscription (free for the first year). You also get a free SSL certificate, either RapidSSL or GeoTrust, depending upon your subscription level. Here are some of the other features of Miva:- Unlimited products for each subscription level.
- High bandwidth amount for each subscription level: 10 GB, 20 GB, and 40 GB, respectively.
- Affordable pricing, scalable to your business.
Themes
One of the things that worried us about Miva is the limited number of themes. There are four themes available with Miva:- Iron and Wool Ready Theme
- Retro Ready Theme
- Optics Ready Theme
- Suivant Ready Theme
Pricing and Payments
All of the Miva subscriptions come with a feature called "enterprise-level pricing." You can easily make price groups to create features and discounts. You can also use the discount and marketing engine to manage coupons, volume pricing, and free shipping. We really liked the number of payment options available with Miva. Miva's partnership with Chase Paymentech supports all the major credit cards, including:- Visa
- American Express
- MasterCard
- Discover
Checkout Pages
We also liked that the checkouts pages with Miva are streamlined and simplified. There are some situations where you customers want to check out with just one easy process. Other payment portal pages need to be more complicated for different industries, and these businesses can make a three or four page checkout. Overall, we feel like Miva's customized checkout process can help you reduce the number of abandoned carts for your customers.Reporting Features
We also like the number of reporting features with Miva, including Google Analytics support. We found that the internal analytics tools with Miva include:- Visual graphs.
- Gross sales reports, including products sales reports (with best sellers).
- Geographic sales information.
- Sales data export as .csv or .xls.
- Custom reporting with multiple categories.
The Bad
- Barriers
- Trial period
- Overage policy
- Mobile app
Barriers
There are a lot of barriers that you have to navigate before you get your store setup:- Inputting a lot of personal and business information.
- Registering or transferring an existing domain name.
- Multiple emails as you validate your business information and enter payment information.
Trial Period
The free trial period with Miva is pretty sketchy. It's not really a free trial period, as you get charged for your first month's subscription. If you decide to cancel within the first 30 days, your account will get refunded. Some customers, in other reviews from around the web, didn't realize that they would be charged for their free trial period.Overage Policy
We also didn't like the overage policy with Miva. If you go over your allotted space or bandwidth, you get $2 GB fee per transfer and $2 per 100 MB of storage. If you have a big site, this can increase your already pricey monthly fee. We found that other providers in the industry did offer unlimited storage and bandwidth for their lower-end subscriptions.Mobile App
Miva also charges a lot to build a mobile app for your e-commerce store. We found that an app for your store costs $1795.00, built through a customized design process.The Bottom Line
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Dylan Buchfink
Miva have worked very hard to ensure their administration interface is user friendly and quick to navigate. When I think of the improvements over the 10 years that I've used Miva, it is spectacular to see how far they've come in this area.
I'd like Miva to provide more control over search functions within their admin. interface. It would be nice to filter out redundant pages/categories/products that we may not want to see in search results.
I recommend thinking about how much control you want over your online store. If you're just planning on being a "me-too" then Miva is likely overkill for your needs. Ironically Miva is also perfect for such a venture as their ReadyThemes could have a basic functional e-commerce store operational in mere days.
Miva have provided us with the tools to make our small family business competitive. We've transformed from a start-up in 2006 to a two-store high end retailer with sales in the many millions. I truly believe Miva has been a big part of allowing for this to happen.
Overall extremely happy with Miva. I've tried every major shopping cart and far and away this is the superior cart for complex stores.
If you're just setting up a simple online store with a handful of products you'd probably do better with Shopify, but they do not compare for customization.
10 years ago
