Miva vs. Mouseflow

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Miva is not responsible for any losses or damages resulting from any interruption or termination of the Services due to outdated or incorrect payment information.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.

Mouseflow is a great when you're working in a busy product development or conversion optimisation environment, and want to understand exactly how customers are interacting with your site or app so you can respond. It's a capable tool that offers some great insight at a fraction of the cost of competitors like SessionCam or ClickTale. It has occasional problems in captures that its competitors suffer from less often, but if you're looking for a general understanding of usage then this is a great tool. It doesn't have built-in integrations with all A/B testing tools, but it does have a built-in Google Tag Manager tag so its very easy to set up without assistance. If you've got the budget to select reliability over cost, then you may choose to opt for a more mature, enterprise offering. But if your budget is limited, or you're just looking to prove the value of session recording as a concept, then Mouseflow will more than do the job.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• 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.

• Mouseflow does a great job creating wonderful Heat Maps. These allow you to really see how people are interacting with a page. Great data if you want to create better flow in your pages.
• The User Session Recordings are also especially useful and when used in conjunction with the heat maps you can really get a feel and a look at how a page is working. This lets you see where people get stuck, elements that might be distracting, etc.
• In the area of the heat maps Mouseflow can handle A/B testing which I think is priceless.
• Another advantage to Mouseflow is that unlike many of these types of tools Mouseflow integrates with most Web platforms, well beyond WordPress.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• 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.

• Free version could have more features.
• Should be optimized for a better view on mobile devices.
• Although it provides a complete list of data, it is not able to capture certain sessions.

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 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.

Mouseflow is pretty easy to use. You need to be a core technical person to implement it on your site. Mouseflow provided us a tracking code that need to be installed on the website, and if do not have the knowledge of how to work on the backend of the website, you will not be able to install it. Here you will need the help of a technical person who has a good knowledge of your website platform to install the code on the website. There are also videos available giving insight on how to use the Mouseflow platform. I personally haven't faced any problem while using Mouseflow. Just login to this tool and a dashboard will open in front of you.

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.

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

This is an area where Mouseflow is quite strong. Not only is the support good but they also have some very good training on the use of the product. There is a nicely laid out section of videos that not only cover the use of the tools functions but also how to use the data that Mouseflow produces. They are doing well in the support area.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

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.

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.

Mouseflow is a supplement to Google Analytics and improves on some Analytics functions. Mouseflow adds qualitative data to the quantitative data that Analytics provides to help marketers better understand their website visitors

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

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.

• 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.

• MouseFlow makes a positive impact on our future marketing decisions. We recently had a change in formula for a product and added a variety of ways for people to read about the changes via our website. Mouseflow allowed us to see which method was effective in communicating our message. We were able to replicate the style on other digital platforms.
• Mouseflow allows us to save time we would normally spend in developing a website. For example, before building a new website I will spend a couple of weeks analyzing user data via mouseflow. I can clearly see what features are not currently working and where we are loosing people in the current process. This cuts down website revisions by about 10%

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info