BigCommerce vs Miva

• Very detailed product description options allows us to showcase our products one-by-one. The multiple options to customize how you can showcase your product is extremely helpful.
• The back-end user home page is the "control center" for managing all incoming orders. It has numerous ways to interact with your orders and communicate with your customers.
• The back-end "control center" allows you to manage your products by category, brand, color, etc. When you have 1000's of products, trying to find it without "professional" skus can be challenging. BC allows you to search with just words.

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• The ability to quickly change the look and feel of any given page in the store. The storefront, category, product description, and all checkout pages are easily customize-able using simple HTML language.
• With minimal effort, more sophisticated changes and behaviors of the store can be modified using MivaScript, the language Miva Merchant is built upon.
• New features are very easy to add using a huge selection of 3rd party feature modules that typically sell for less that $100. Miva has so many features already built in, but if there is a major common feature not already in the code, it's almost a sure bet that there is a affordable and easy to install module that will meet your e-commerce business requirements.
• Miva corporation provides a high level of free support 7 days a week and 24 hours a day.

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• Need to be able to add tracking information to customer order
• Would like shipping alert to be editable to include tracking number
• Need more of a WIZWIG editor or theme options that do not require coding, most clients cannot handle the areas of the platform that require html skills to edit

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• Prospective and established merchants considering the Miva platform should be warned that they've recently implemented an onerous new fee when more than one person accesses the store admin area at any given time. Specifically, Miva merchants will now be on the hook for $50 per additional simultaneous user per month. If we had remained on Miva, this would have increased our annual costs of using the platform by at least $3,000, perhaps more. The president of Miva claims this is standard for SaaS e-commerce platforms, but I know of none that do and this change makes their platform incredibly unattractive for merchants who expect their business to grow in the future. Furthermore, certain third-party services can be detected by the Miva HQ tracking system as admin users, also triggering an additional seat fee.
• Exorbitant pricing for adding some basic features that feels like a petty cash grab. For instance, we opted for the $1,000 mobile optimization package and received a bare bones mobile-friendly site with no appearance refinements aside from crudely plopping our logo at the top. They forgot to optimize a few key pages, like the product search results, and it seemed like whoever did it rushed through the work in an hour or two. Other projects they helped with went better, but there's frequently minor coding errors we've had to clean up ourselves.
• Features released with updates practically always require developer assistance to test and properly enable.
• Issues that should be treated as bugs are instead left for third-party modules to correct. For example, if a wholesale customer adds items to their cart before logging in, those items retain the standard retail price when the order is placed. We informed Miva tech support of this, expecting that they might look into fixing the problem, but were instead told that we should buy an add-on module that forces a cart recalculation at checkout. Why should this be the responsibility of an extra module to correct? It should be noted that a year or two ago Miva purchased the Emporium Plus plugin catalog, including the cart recalculation module, yet that is still omitted from the core platform.

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• Using BigCommerce with the integrated ShipStation app has helped me save time immensely for processing shipping.
• Among our products is a digital download. BigCommerce has made it possible for us to sell our downloadable product.
• Merely by using BigCommerce, I've been ranked on page one of Google and other search engines. I have not had to pay for SEO. This has given us greater visibility to customers searching for what we offer.

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• Running a business in general (and this applies to e-commerce of course) involves not enough time to do too many things. Any place one can automate/streamline/ simplify some of these myriad things, you gain more time to focus on high value activities. We have found that the more we have been able to leverage Miva's capabilities (often with our own tools), the more time we can spend on marketing, sales and product development.

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