Miva vs. Shopify Plus

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is not responsible for any losses or damages resulting from any interruption or termination of the Services due to outdated or incorrect payment information.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

Any business that needs to keep track of orders and payments would benefit from Shopify Plus. Customers information, orders, and payments are all saved and available for reference. You are able to refer to past orders to review trends and offer future purchase suggestions. Shopify Plus is also easy to use so it does not take long to train employees how to use this system.

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.

• Scales incredibly well. Forget about hardware concerns, load balancing, downtime, etc. and focus on eCommerce. We've seen merchants go from a few thousand dollars per month to having million dollar days, all on Shopify without having to worry about performance or scaling systems.
• Great new features consistently being added, ahead of the curve on almost everything
• Solid API to build on and work with, a few annoying quirks here and there for super complex use cases but overall very well documented and works well
• Most Merchant Success Managers are good and genuinely want to be helpful
• A fantastic user interface, very logical and easy to use
• Tons and tons and tons of out of the box integrations. Easily the best integration marketplace of the e-commerce platforms. There's an app for that.

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.

• The Account Managers/Reps have become more scripted and seem like they are busier and handling more clients than before. It doesn't seem as personal and special anymore like when we first upgraded to Plus.
• Shopify still has missing features in their software that might not have an app in their app marketplace available that fills this void.
• The 24/7 support doesn't seem as dedicated as they once were.

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.

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.

It just works! It is so prolific worldwide that there are a plethora of partners who can support you. Development time is cut in half as many plugins can be used that would require custom development on other platforms. It is stable, fast, and scalable.

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

Always are quick to answer our questions and help us find a solution

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.

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.

Shopify had the quickest go-to-market and most robust API among the products we compared. CommerceCloud required a VERY LONG integration phase that we just didn't have time for. BigCommerce fell short on the number of features and API coverage that we needed. Overall Shopify gave us the most bang for the buck.

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.

• 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.

• Shopify Plus has been a very cost effective solution for us.
• As our business grows, it's easy to train new hires on how to use Shopify Plus.
• What we've lost in the missing features of Shopify we've made up for in the other areas.

Incentivized