EvolutionX vs. Miva

EvolutionX is great at getting a large catalog online in a hurry. Though the editing may take some time, the pull is a great feature to get you started. EvolutionX will give you the most professional looking site right out of the gate vs the competitors we have viewed. The person assigned to your account is a nice benefit and are very helpful and efficient this is an even bigger plus for those with no coding experience. EvolutionX may not be the best option for a small business, though the website may make you look like the big dogs it doesn't function as well yet. The cost of the service is high compared to what the customer gets from it after the initial set up and is the main reason why this isnt the best solution for a small business. It would be nice to see the price to be able to scale down or up in price with how well the site is doing after a set amount of time.

Incentivized

Miva is a SaaS closed platform. Page builder has bugs and errors, it's not as easy to work with as they say. To work with Miva, you need to work with their professional services or an agency, it's not a cheap platform to make changes to. Has anyone read the latest terms of service update from Miva sent out yesterday 5/21? It's extremely concerning. Miva could shut you off the day after a payment for your subscription fails. Why would they do this to their customers?

Under section C. (ii) Payment Terms: d (ii) Customer shall be in default of this Agreement. If Customer’s Account is not paid in full on the invoice date, Miva reserves the right to interrupt or terminate Customer’s access to and use of the Services and to any other Miva Products and/or Services on the following day. Miva is not responsible for any losses or damages resulting from any interruption or termination of the Services due to outdated or incorrect payment information.

Miva is based in San Diego, CA. Under California law (e.g., California Business and Professions Code § 17200 for unfair business practices), a 24-hour notice period for service suspension could be deemed unreasonable, especially
for a critical business service like an ecommerce platform. Courts often expect “reasonable notice” (typically 5-30 days) to allow the customer to cure the default.

This change isn't lawful and it's extremely concerning to anyone who hosts a website on their platform. No opportunity to cure? They used to have a 15 day grace period to cure. One would wonder why they would be unreasonable
in taking this away when it's best practice throughout the e-commerce industry.

• Very easy to onboard products
• Pricing updates are easy due to bulk editing (export to excel -> import back to EvoX)
• It's easy to run promotions / sales with just a few clicks
• SEO options with ready to grab site map

Incentivized

• 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.

• On the backend, it would be nice to be able to COPY a similar sku to edit and make its own - creating items takes too long
• The option for drop downs for different colors / sizes / etc. could be nice
• The ability to export pricing where you can see the cost too would be nice

Incentivized

• 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.

It is a good platform with good customizable features for our customers.

Incentivized

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.

EvoX is a very user friendly platform, both for admin and customers. On the admin side, there are lots of KBs and videos to watch to learn more on the site and features of it. On the customer side, the features provided make it very easy for our customers. Quicklists are a feature we push to customers to make their ordering experience as easy as possible. B2B has a priority to make ordering as easy as possible, our customers are busy and need to place their orders quickly. If the customer cannot do that with your company, they will find one that does do that for them

Incentivized

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.

I havnt come across an issue like this since we’ve started using it.

Incentivized

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.

Havnt seen any slowdowns.

Incentivized

ECI has always provided good support for us on EvoX. Weather it is via monthly conversations to the intercom system, EvoX is quick to respond and look into the issue. Our sales reps are also a huge support for us to contact on any major issues that may come up

Incentivized

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

In-person training was not an option for us.

Incentivized

Hard to remember specifics, but I think it was executed at a level where we were satisfied.

Incentivized

This project took some time for us to complete. Some of it was on our end with data cleanup, but overall I thought it went well.

Incentivized

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.

Evolution X feels better built specifically for our industry and helps to provide relevant supplier catalogues, it also opens us up to dialogue with new suppliers and partnerships to form around this. For instance our ACCO account has grown by x8 since we started adding their catalogue by Fusion Data via EVOX. PrestaShop is all added by spreadsheet and there is no pre-populated catalogue ready to add which means it relies on our in-house capabilities or the supplier to provide feeds to import which not many of them have

Incentivized

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 only one where we had access to not only the core of the platform, but every part of our page templates. Most platforms will give you a box to stay in, but Miva lets you define the box, and when it doesn't fit your needs, you can adjust it to bring it where it will benefit your company most. Some of the major benefits that we couldn't find on other platforms: Ability to incorporate APIs at any stage of customer journey Unlimited Custom / Complex Product Configurators and Builders Easy to understand the structure and hierarchy of pages and templates.

10/10 is a hard rating for me to give, but I have been impressed with the scalability

Incentivized

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.

• Massive time savings for our AR Department as customers can now self-generate account statements, see past invoices, pay balances, etc.
• Huge improvement for in-store customer service as our floor associates and reps can reference the website inventory to provide quick assistance to customers on their mobile devices.
• Increased sales & revenue thanks to broader reach- most of our walk-in customers now start their shopping journey on our website to identify product availability and pricing.

Incentivized

• 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.