Marg Miva

Our company has used Miva Merchant for 12 years. We have had an enormous amount of growth from this platform as Miva is very easy to use for small businesses that do not have an IT department. If you are selling under a 1 Million a year, Miva software is very good for beginning eCommerce applications. The GUI is easy to use and flexible for most applications. I was able to get my web site started with minimal HTML capabilities and as the company grew, we were able to do much more.

Miva Software is very good. Miva billing practices are highly unethical. We are in the process of leaving Miva Merchant for Drupal as they have recently started billed our company for $350 in fines PER MONTH because it is not practical for our company to upgrade from Miva 5.5 (which is actually version 8 to Miva 9 during the busy holiday season. Under Miva 9, we are only allowed to have one IT manager logged in at a time, they are now selling “Seats” for $50/each to have more employees logged into the store. They incorrectly estimated we were using 7 “Seats” on the OLD license and proceeded to fine us for $50/each x 7 per month. We must continue to pay this fine until our Drupal commerce site is fully operational. Miva has us trapped for now, but we will be out of this unethical billing practice soon. I strongly suggest looking at alternative options if you are considering Miva Merchant. This is not the first time we have had billing issues. In the past, they were very accommodating because we have used their software for 12 years. Our company attorneys are considering a class-action suite against Miva Merchant as a review of their license agreement we are under does not include any form of “Seat” licensing fees. They claim they are entitled to the new fines under their “Price Increase” option in the license agreement. Other merchants have also complained of similar billing problems with refusal to refund, search Miva Reviews and you will find them. My advice: RUN!

Unethical billing practices are forcing us away from Miva, we are moving to Drupal where we have no limitations and are free from having another company control our upgrade policy. My advice: RUN!

From a technical perspective, our IT department has problems working with and managing the data generated by Miva for use in other applications. 3rd party development is not as well supported as the Drupal platform. Additionally, unused shopping carts must be cleared weekly or our site WILL crash. There does not seem to be an automated way of clearing the unused carts. We use 3rd party modules, a serious source of concern for any version upgrade.

It has nice shopping cart components. I like that it keeps track of your inventory. That is very important for someone who has a lot of items to sell. Didn't see a good way to integrate online tickets for events through Miva Merchant.

I really disliked the difficulty to customize the templates in the Miva Merchant language. That was really hard to understand. I hate how they have the shipping set up, especially if you need to separate how different states shipping fees. There should be a module for Miva Merchant for that, especially since postal rates changes all the time and are based on weight now. Training the user on how to update their store was like a nightmare. If I can't understand it, they sure can't either.

I would look at all your options first before deciding on what shopping site cms you would like to use. They all have their pros and cons. What works for one person may not work for someone else.

I realized that all shopping cart sites have their ups and downs. The most thing you have to factor in is how you are processing payments. I really like Stripe for processing payments. The benefit of keeping track of inventory is really awesome and something that all shopping site cms should have in their system.

What do I like best? Probably nothing. It really has nothing that would make me jump for joy and exclaim it to be special to Miiva. Everything is has is standard for around 8 years now, but if you are expecting new age and modern functions of a modern ecommerce site then you are at the wrong place.

It is outdated in almost every way. The first thing that drives me completely crazy about it is how it treats your online inventory like a brick and mortar store. If someone adds an item into their cart then you have to wait for the cart to expire so you can delete it and add the item back into your inventory. Makes it very annoying to sell off the last few units of inventory and there is no way around it as it is a core function of miva. It has no way to reward customers and no effective referral program. Typing everything including your terms of service requires an understanding of html since everything has to be done in html. If you want to ask the miva techs themselves for help with programing or anything then be prepared to receive absolutely insane quotes from them. We paid $8000 to build our site and miva quoted us $13,000 do slightly re-do our checkout page's aesthetics. Everything about this platform is completely non-automated that it added an ungodly amount of labor hours just to get basic things done that be had in a shoddy woocommerce site.

If you plan on having a future for your online store then do not use Miva.

I'm trying to create an effective online store. I have realized that miva is the wrong place to do it and that shopify rocks!

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

I have been using Miva Merchant for over a dozen years and find that their support is about the best there is. Answers to questions whether over the phone or via email are answered promptly and professionally. Rarely if ever do I have to contact more than once to have an issue solved.

In the past Miva always nickeled and dimed with extra costs. Extra seats, extra for modules that were built in to other shopping carts, etc. In November of last year the price increased for us from $59.00 to $249.00 per month. For a small business that does a little over $100,000 per year the price increase made it impossible to stay with Miva. We loved Miva but were force to switch.

If you have HTML skill and are not a newbie this is a very good product.

As first a developer of ecommerce stores for others who used Miva Merchant exclusively, I always felt that Miva Merchant was the right product for our clients. We were able to tailor it to their needs. In 2011 we started our own ecommerce site using Miva Merchant and it worked flawlessly. Now as our business has grown substantially we are finding that there are other shopping carts that can do the job with all features that we require being built in to the system and are more cost effective.