BigCommerce is a SaaS platform that allows SMBs to develop eCommerce sites. Features include the capabilities to design the storefront, configure products, manage payments, generate traffic, and optimize conversion.
$29.95
per month
Miva
Score 4.6 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Miva Merchant is a point-and-click, online store development and management system that allows merchants to build their online store through a web browser, and lets developers provide aftermarket enhancements for the online store.
N/A
Pricing
BigCommerce
Miva
Editions & Modules
Standard
$29.95
per month
Plus
$79.95
per month*
Pro
$299.95
per month*
Enterprise
Custom
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BigCommerce
Miva
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
*if paid annually
Miva employs a revenue-based pricing model. The Miva platform is best suited to growing mid-size and enterprise merchants that have complex business needs and are making (or planning to make) $1 million or more in annual online revenue.
Each player has positive features and value to add to a business. BigCommerce and Shopify have brand recognition that has lead to them being the more common choice in eCommerce. Overall, they have their place for simple B2C sites, and less complex B2B sites. Miva was the …
Miva is so much more customer oriented and willing to work with and for you. There are many modules you can install to get specific functionality to work, but if there's none available, they are more than willing to work with you to accomplish your needs. Miva actually listens …
Magento - BigCommerce - Shopify. In essence it all depends on the end client needs and project specifications. Miva Merchant seems to be the most flexible in the bunch at the most attractive pricing (SaaS model)
Well suited for running a catalogue website where categories/brands/products don't change frequently. Adding new products is somewhat cumbersome, but overall the experience is fine for maintaining inventory on our BigCommerce site. We're satisfied with how our site navigates and looks today, with lots of hits through search engines, so ultimately we're happy with this platform.
I feel that in the manufacturing and B2B space, Miva excels. They have the right talent on their team to ensure the technology works and scales with your business. From my experiences, Miva works with you to ensure that there is a fit. They are looking to build a partnership, and they have the ability to really understand your needs and uses. If you have a complex use case, or website need - Miva is the fit. There has not been anything that we have thrown at the platform that it cannot handle in some function. Their API library is constantly expanding, and we have even been able to improve tools that we wrote when we first started with Miva in the new API to get more function and speed. If you are simply looking to dropship goods, offer a very small product catalog, or not customize a template for different types of users, Miva may not be a great fit. Miva can do those things, but it really shines when you are working with large datasets of both customers, orders, products, and images.
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.
The Miva admin area hasn't been the most user-friendly in the past. However, the admin in the the upcoming new Miva Merchant 9 Release has been completely revamped, is VERY user-friendly, and is formatted for desktop as well as mobile devices.
Some fairly standard ecommerce functionality like Gift Certificates, Coupons, Sale Prices, etc have previously required third-party modules or template customization. However, many of these features are being built into Miva Merchant upcoming releases.
We are really very likely to renew our use of BigCommerce. The reason I chose 9 instead of 10 is simply because of the hiccups we are running into with our POS. BigCommerce is excellent, but we may even want to take a step further and get into and ERP that can take care of everything. Since we are a brick & mortar store first, and eCommerce second, our POS is very important to our day to day operations
For most clients, the MIVA Merchant platform, in combination with 3rd party plugins from ADS, Emporium Plus, eMediaSales and Sebenza, has all of the bells and whistles they need. While MIVA is lacking in a mobile friendly option and the ability to easily sell soft goods like mp3's or eBooks, these additions are coming to MIVA soon. The lack of connectivity to popular POS systems is also a negative for us. We will certainly continue to offer MIVA Merchant to clients.
I think that overall it has a great front end for the customer. On the back end, it takes a little spin-up time, but in just a couple of hours you can really have your head wrapped around everything you're going to need 99% of the time. It takes me about 5 minutes to train a new user on how to interact with customer orders.
I won't say usability is all bad with Miva; basic product configuration isn't complicated and assigning products to categories works well. However, when you go beyond the most elementary tasks, things almost always become needlessly cumbersome and the information stored by the platform is inherently poorly organized. They've really hyped that Miva 9 released last year features a re-worked admin interface, but from our perspective they've simply given it a fresh coat of paint, made the layout passably mobile friendly, but yet still have not in a substantive way addressed the glaring deficiencies at the core of the platform itself. Adding custom admin area bookmarks is a band aid, not a proper fix.
Exceptional up time, free 24/7 customer service - and they are in the USA and actually speak English and can solve any problem! They are great to work with. Always easy to call in and get help.
I work with multiple Miva sites daily, and uptime is fantastic. Outages are rare from my experience, and any issues have generally been short and handled quickly.
All reporting is online and in real time, you can run comparisons, customer data, tax reports with just a click. No waiting. Export customers or inventory easily and update/re-import with another click
Because they are always there no matter how simple or complex the question is, if they don't know the answer they don't fake it and just make you go away feeling frustrated.. they get you to someone that does know the answer. I always appreciate their help and their honesty!
I would give 10, but there were a couple of times when I was misinformed and I had to do some unnecessary work. When you have to work on every product individually and then you discover you could have done it in bulk it kind of makes you roll your eyes back. I also have an issue still with some shipping settings that no one seems to understand. But the support team is super friendly, they are trying
They have a comprehensive online help file system that makes it easy to do almost anything. They cover just about everything you'd want to do with your online store with images, clear descriptions and in some cases video. I will, however, say the videos should be a little more professorially done and not sound like the employees are doing it in their cubical.
A certified BigCommerce design and solution partner will usually comprise a team of highly experienced designers, developers and marketers. It is our view that in the vast majority of cases, this will pay dividends in the long-term - especially for those teams that could use the extra support.
Creating the Miva store originally took a reasonable amount of time, 2-3 months, but we were unable to migrate our orders and customer accounts from the old platform. Additional refinements were required over the following 6 months to refine the functionality and features so that they worked properly for our store and fulfillment process.
We switched from Shopify due to the restrictions they implemented on our industry. While we spent tens of thousands of dollars investing in our Shopify store, we can't have them cutting us off anytime they want. We reviewed WooCommerce, but didn't like the storefront or backend. Plus it seems like Wordpress/WooCommerce runs into tons of hacking issues and bugs.
Versatility and customer service. There is nothing more frustrating than being in the middle of a task and having to do tech support via a computer-generated chat box. Miva Merchant gives you a live tech support engineer 24/7.
We started out as a startup company and started with BigCommerce, and as of today, as no longer a startup company, we are still able to use BigCommerce for all of our needs. Almost every one of our departments uses BigCommerce in some capacity for their specific roles within the company.
Miva has proven to be a great solution for smaller mom-and-pop stores through large enterprise-class businesses with tens of thousands of products. Performance is just as strong on enterprise-class stores as on considerably smaller stores, and an increasing number of marketing/sales tools are continually being added to the core Miva functionality to keep up with current marketplace demands.
Provides a robust platform to sell a high-risk product.
Page Builder saves you time and money by negating the need to buy a template.
Includes robust promotion settings that allow for codes and automatic discounts, bulk discounts, and customer groups (i.e. military discount), all native options.
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.
