Miva vs Shopify

• 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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• Ease of Use - Very user friendly. Anyone can pick it up within a couple days and know how to do almost everything.
• Great Customer Service - The help is excellent. Also, they have a huge community where people are happy to help.
• Ton of Add-Ons - You can find a ton of add-ons and modules to use that can be installed by you. They don't require developers.
• Inexpensive - Because it's easy to use and doesn't require a ton of developer time, it's so much cheaper to run.

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• Prospective and established merchants considering the Miva platform should be warned that they've recently implemented an onerous new fee when more than one person accesses the store admin area at any given time. Specifically, Miva merchants will now be on the hook for $50 per additional simultaneous user per month. If we had remained on Miva, this would have increased our annual costs of using the platform by at least $3,000, perhaps more. The president of Miva claims this is standard for SaaS e-commerce platforms, but I know of none that do and this change makes their platform incredibly unattractive for merchants who expect their business to grow in the future. Furthermore, certain third-party services can be detected by the Miva HQ tracking system as admin users, also triggering an additional seat fee.
• Exorbitant pricing for adding some basic features that feels like a petty cash grab. For instance, we opted for the $1,000 mobile optimization package and received a bare bones mobile-friendly site with no appearance refinements aside from crudely plopping our logo at the top. They forgot to optimize a few key pages, like the product search results, and it seemed like whoever did it rushed through the work in an hour or two. Other projects they helped with went better, but there's frequently minor coding errors we've had to clean up ourselves.
• Features released with updates practically always require developer assistance to test and properly enable.
• Issues that should be treated as bugs are instead left for third-party modules to correct. For example, if a wholesale customer adds items to their cart before logging in, those items retain the standard retail price when the order is placed. We informed Miva tech support of this, expecting that they might look into fixing the problem, but were instead told that we should buy an add-on module that forces a cart recalculation at checkout. Why should this be the responsibility of an extra module to correct? It should be noted that a year or two ago Miva purchased the Emporium Plus plugin catalog, including the cart recalculation module, yet that is still omitted from the core platform.

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• Shopping cart is hard to customize and it's hosted by Shopify separately
• Transaction fees can get high if you have a lot of transactions
• To do any special customizations, you will need a developer and the platform is somewhat rigid with capabilities.

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• 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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• Shopify has allowed me to add more products than I could have ordered on my own with investment upfront. Their dropshipping apps and tools make it the perfect add on to any clothing businesses to get started with less investment up front.
• Within Shopify's app store I was able to use an affiliate app to help track influencers and sales that originated from those influencers to drive more sales. This paid app returns 100x its original cost each month and serves as a significant revenue generator to our store's sales.

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