Miva vs. Optimizely Customized Commerce

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Miva
Score 5.7 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
Optimizely Customized Commerce
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Optimizely Customized Commerce is a headless PaaS commerce solution built to scale commerce results for enterprise brands.N/A
Pricing
MivaOptimizely Customized Commerce
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MivaOptimizely Customized Commerce
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeRequired
Additional DetailsMiva 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.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
MivaOptimizely Customized Commerce
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
MivaOptimizely Customized Commerce
Online Storefront
Comparison of Online Storefront features of Product A and Product B
Miva
8.3
2 Ratings
8% above category average
Optimizely Customized Commerce
7.5
26 Ratings
2% below category average
Product catalog & listings8.62 Ratings8.525 Ratings
Product management8.62 Ratings4.825 Ratings
Bulk product upload9.12 Ratings8.721 Ratings
Branding8.62 Ratings5.223 Ratings
Mobile storefront9.12 Ratings7.020 Ratings
Product variations8.62 Ratings7.021 Ratings
Website integration7.82 Ratings8.724 Ratings
Visual customization8.62 Ratings8.623 Ratings
CMS5.52 Ratings8.925 Ratings
Online Shopping Cart
Comparison of Online Shopping Cart features of Product A and Product B
Miva
7.5
2 Ratings
1% below category average
Optimizely Customized Commerce
8.6
19 Ratings
13% above category average
Abandoned cart recovery7.32 Ratings8.615 Ratings
Checkout user experience7.82 Ratings8.619 Ratings
Online Payment System
Comparison of Online Payment System features of Product A and Product B
Miva
7.7
2 Ratings
8% below category average
Optimizely Customized Commerce
8.8
17 Ratings
6% above category average
eCommerce security7.72 Ratings8.817 Ratings
eCommerce Marketing
Comparison of eCommerce Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Miva
7.3
2 Ratings
2% below category average
Optimizely Customized Commerce
7.1
25 Ratings
5% below category average
Promotions & discounts8.12 Ratings8.421 Ratings
Personalized recommendations6.82 Ratings8.421 Ratings
SEO6.82 Ratings4.421 Ratings
eCommerce Business Management
Comparison of eCommerce Business Management features of Product A and Product B
Miva
8.0
6 Ratings
3% above category average
Optimizely Customized Commerce
8.1
25 Ratings
4% above category average
Multi-site management9.11 Ratings8.620 Ratings
Order processing7.86 Ratings8.819 Ratings
Inventory management7.22 Ratings8.815 Ratings
Shipping7.72 Ratings8.716 Ratings
Custom functionality8.12 Ratings5.723 Ratings
Best Alternatives
MivaOptimizely Customized Commerce
Small Businesses
Ecwid by Lightspeed
Ecwid by Lightspeed
Score 10.0 out of 10
Ecwid by Lightspeed
Ecwid by Lightspeed
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Digital Commerce
IBM Digital Commerce
Score 9.0 out of 10
IBM Digital Commerce
IBM Digital Commerce
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Digital Commerce
IBM Digital Commerce
Score 9.0 out of 10
IBM Digital Commerce
IBM Digital Commerce
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
MivaOptimizely Customized Commerce
Likelihood to Recommend
5.2
(22 ratings)
8.6
(26 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(16 ratings)
4.6
(2 ratings)
Usability
6.7
(5 ratings)
7.3
(7 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.7
(4 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(5 ratings)
2.7
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
MivaOptimizely Customized Commerce
Likelihood to Recommend
Miva
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.
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Optimizely
Our experience may be unique because we opted for an Epi core team to implement our website/console set-up and connection to our PIM and ERP. The experience may have been different with a 3rd party or it may not have. That said, we have been live with our primary website for almost 2 years and I still do not consider it was ever "done". We have been going back and forth on functionality issues and bugs since launch. I have low confidence that changes made the previous day will 100% be online the next - so my team rechecks the work they did the previous day to ensure everything is online. The addition of a second channel and enhancement requests have compounded the issues. I feel this product would work fine with singular or less complex market SKU offerings.
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Pros
Miva
  • 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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Optimizely
  • Episerver has a robust discount engine. This engine, combined with "visitor groups" allow our marketing department to categorize customers and offer a variety of discounts to targeted customers at specific times.
  • Episerver has a full-featured, storefront experience that can handle everything you might want for an e-commerce website.
  • Episerver offers A/B testing that can be helpful for trying out new content ideas and tracking the results.
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Cons
Miva
  • 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.
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Optimizely
  • Support. Episerver used to have direct support and access to the tech team to discuss and resolve issues. The new support portal is not enough for developer needs.
  • Quality Assurance. We find issues in the Episerver code that should have been resolved in QA before release.
  • Sales. Episervers sells the framework as a solution while showing Alloy. While it helps Episerver sell more, it puts the implementation partner into trouble as the client thinks they bought the solution. Episerver does not provide a solution. It provides a framework that you can build a solution on.
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Likelihood to Renew
Miva
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.
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Optimizely
Really want to be able to spend more time and resources on rolling out new things with Episerver but at the moment we seem to be fixing alot of issues and pain points with the way our system was setup.
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Usability
Miva
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.
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Optimizely
The administrative interface is largely intuitive and relatively easy to use. The complexity of business needs and ability to customize can affect this (i.e. you have to set up and develop with the user in mind), but the basic structure is largely solid. There are some areas of redundancy (such as Commerce Manager overlapping with other administrative areas) that can sometimes cause confusion or offer some functions in one place, whereas other related functions are managed on a completely different page.
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Reliability and Availability
Miva
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.
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Optimizely
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Miva
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
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Optimizely
We had an incredible team at Episerver Supporting us with the go live, reviewing our integration, and pushing our integration partner to deliver a quality product
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Implementation Rating
Miva
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.
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Optimizely
Fully understand what is OOTB feature of the platform before proceeding to develop. Then implement a customization of key features once you can prove they are working as OOTB to make them more user friendly and productive for the business. Eg pre order and e gift card
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Alternatives Considered
Miva
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.
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Optimizely
Optimizely Commerce Cloud offers a very wide range of features for admin users. There is less a need for an IT specialist or programmer to be involved when changes need to be made.
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Scalability
Miva
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.
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Optimizely
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Miva
  • 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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Optimizely
  • Positive: We have a usable website - better than what we had before and we are seeing a constant increase in adoption.
  • Positive: Counter associates are using the website to help customers.
  • Negative: Too much time being spent QCing previous work.
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ScreenShots

Optimizely Customized Commerce Screenshots

Screenshot of Customizable checkout workflow to tailor customers checkout experience and increase conversions.Screenshot of Catalogs, custom attributes, UOM, catalog restrictions, and multiple sites are managed at once.Screenshot of Personalized promotions based on user web activity to drive conversion and increase average order value.Screenshot of Customized Recommendations ReportingScreenshot of Personalization