BigCommerce vs Miva

• They have a great WYSIWYG interface for creating webpage content.
• The software allows us to create multiple pack sizes, using different units of measure, for any or all of our products.
• It is very easy to add product categories, manipulate the top-level menu headings, and swap out graphic elements.

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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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• The backend interface for working with orders could use some more options for dynamically querying and sorting orders. For example, it's very difficult to see all of the orders that are currently unfulfilled for a given customer. It's also impossible to see all of the orders in a given date range that contained a specific SKU.
• It would be nice to be able to delete SKUs that are no longer in use. Even if the product is removed, the SKU it held is still stored and locked in the system. Sometimes these show up on exports and cause confusion.
• Some of the options and settings are a little unintuitive on their location, and you need to dig a few options deep to find the ones you're looking for. A more straightforward settings page would be appreciated.
• More ways to customize check out, such as with separately acceptable Terms and Conditions, and alerts for Delays in Shipping or Fulfillment.

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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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• ROI improved after migrated ecommerce from Woo commerce to WordPress[.]
• BigCommerce support provided 24x7 so no downtime on website[.]
• Easy to use admin for non technical clients[.]
• Drop shipping needs to improve which help to improve more ROI[.]
• Abandoned cart saver[.]

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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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