Likelihood to Recommend The Bronto Marketing Platform
If you're a mid-size to larger business and rely on regular email engagement from customers, then Bronto Marketing Platform could be a potentially great partner if not game-changer for how you've been doing email campaign management previously. Their automation tools and development interface is amicable. The amount of data that's collected and available from engagement with subscribers through their tools can be overwhelming. Still, if you enjoy digging into every kernel of possible user activity information, you'll love it.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros The Bronto Marketing Platform
It's easy to work with – it has seamless integration across all platforms, which helps when you're working with big clientele. It's logically organized, which can't be said of all ESP's. It has the LIVE CHAT support. A lot of email marketing clients simply don't have that. It's the little things! Read full review 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. Steven Seale Senior Solution Architect / Technical Project Manager
Read full review Cons The Bronto Marketing Platform
Segmenting- although there's a lot that can be done with segmenting audiences, there's a bit of a learning curve when it comes to setting up segments. Wish it was more intuitive. Workflows- setting up automation workflows requires some practice and I've needed to consult a Bronto support person each time I set up a new workflow. Bronto Pop-up manager- we use this feature, not sure how common it is among Bronto clients, but there is overall some improvement needed with this tool. There is limited capability to update the look and feel of the pop-up manager, and we've run into some conflicts with other pop-ups on our website interfering with the Bronto pop-up. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew The Bronto Marketing Platform
Never really had any issues that caused out-of-the-ordinary frustration levels. Of course, you'll have days where the learning curve of using a tool gets challenging. Still, I don't remember ever really coming across an obstacle or roadblock while using the tool because of a feature or function it just couldn't do successfully or at all. Customer support was always available as needed, and it was generally easy to find answers to questions when they arose.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability The Bronto Marketing Platform
Usability is great. Very intuitive drag-and-drip metaphor for building automations. And the UI is very user-centric. It constantly prompts you with suggestions and next steps such that you hardly have to refer to the (excellent) documentation.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability The Bronto Marketing Platform
I never experienced any downtime.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Performance The Bronto Marketing Platform
No issues.
Read full review Support Rating The Bronto Marketing Platform
They used to be good, but they've evolved into a monolithic bureaucratic nightmare after the Netsuite / Oracle acquisition. Can't talk to anyone that actually knows the system and support tickets seem to go days or weeks without responses and resolution.
Read full review 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
Read full review Online Training The Bronto Marketing Platform
They have lots of videos on list importing / segmentation / report customization etc. when you sign on they give a link to online tutorials and documentation which is very helpful. They have very helpful PDFs on how to import / set up platform
Read full review Implementation Rating The Bronto Marketing Platform
Easy to set up.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered The Bronto Marketing Platform
Bronto hits the sweet spot for us. It is most similar to the
Salesforce family of products.
Salesforce however can feel cluttered and configuration and setup can be time consuming and confusing. Bronto is much more streamlined and also has features built in that may require additional purchases in the
Salesforce world.
Adobe Campaign is a very powerful solution and can do many things hard to achieve in Bronto. However, Campaign is much more of a developer tool where Bronto is easy to learn and use right out of the box.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Scalability The Bronto Marketing Platform
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.
Read full review Return on Investment The Bronto Marketing Platform
Offering great reporting for tracking everything. I can see what emails are working (I track on a monthly basis) and what people are clicking. A/B split testing lets us try different things. Try this and that. Creating lists and segments of subscribers lets us look at who is the best performing contacts. Really get 'into the data' and understand what is working and what is not. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots