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Why Linentablecloth.com left Miva Merchant
October 11, 2021

Why Linentablecloth.com left Miva Merchant

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Miva Merchant

We left Miva for Shopify in September 2021. We used Miva for almost four years. But it became too costly compared to alternatives like Big Commerce and Shopify, and they've really fallen behind as a platform. Shopify has many more features, is much easier to use, and costs us 1/3rd the monthly rate we were paying Miva.
  • Rock Solid Hosting
  • Great Support
  • Good Shopping Cart Platform
  • Far too costly compared to alternatives
  • Not easy to learn or use
  • Limited integrations to other popular services like: Trust Pilot, Google Shopping, etc.
  • [In my experience, ]company management is stubborn and deaf to customer input
  • It was a great improvement over our previous shopping cart Magento
  • Removed website hosting and maintenance headache
  • Competent solution and rock solid
Miva is more costly than its competitors. [In my opinion] it's harder to set up and use and user interface is cumbersome. Requires costly customization for integration to services you get from Big Commerce or Shopify right out of the box. No Google Shopping integration. No Trust Pilot, no Zendesk, etc. [I think] Product Catalog management is not well thought out. [In my experience] you'll spend much more time tweaking Miva to get what you want out of it compared to Shopify, which is frankly, a joy to use.

Do you think Miva delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Miva's feature set?

No

Did Miva live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Miva go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Miva again?

No

MIVA used to fill the space for companies that weren't small, but also weren't huge. Now [I believe] they're just plain too expensive for the little guy, and also for the small and medium sized online retailers. Seems they've thrown competitive pricing to the wind, and have given into blatant greed. [In my opinion, Miva Merchant is] definitely not worth what they try to charge.

Miva Feature Ratings

Using Miva Merchant

ProsCons
Convenient
Familiar
Unnecessarily complex
Not well integrated
Inconsistent
Slow to learn
  • Adding products
  • Paying the monthly SAAS fee - 3 times that of their competitors!
  • Product catalog management [can be] difficult and confusing
  • [In my experience,] importing and exporting data is limited, difficult and confusing
Yes - Reasonably well
Compared to other shopping cart solutions I've vetted, Miva falls short. It seems its taxonomy was created decades ago and they feel no motivation to improve or upgrade it. For example: creating website navigation is tough with Miva. Shopify uses tags and filters - a much better way to get where you need to go, so to create a site with great product navigation is super easy compared to Miva. Also, any kind of cosmetic website layout changes require you to either use Miva's expensive and slow professional services, or go through a recommended partner agency, which could also be expensive and slow. Shopify is simple to use, even for a company like mine (+10 mil/yr rev).