Miva vs. Stripe Payments

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is not responsible for any losses or damages resulting from any interruption or termination of the Services due to outdated or incorrect payment information.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

We had a client who wanted a QR to use in their marketing, which enabled their clients to donate to us. It was so useful to be able to set it up, and we can track the views and donations received using this code. Another client with issues with our website wanted to set up a monthly subscription, so I sent her a payment link, which worked brilliantly. For clients that want to make one-time donations, it also lets the client choose the amount. The only scenario where we haven't been able to help is when clients want to change the card associated with the payment - whilst we understand it is for security/gdpr, it means they have to cancel and set up something new, which poses the danger that we may lose them as a customer.

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• 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.

• They are reliable. I can count on everything going smoothly with transactions.
• They are accurate. I don’t run into problems with collecting the proper amounts or being overcharged for fees.
• They have good customer service. If I have a question about the customer portal or a problem with a customer, they help me resolve these issues.

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• 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 would be nice to be able to see my Shopify payments from my main payment gateway. I currently have to go to Shopify for that.
• The ability to be able to offer discounted rates at a smaller threshold would be nice.

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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.

Stripe is the leader in the industry when it comes to any type of industry. All that is needed is a plan and then implementing that plan either with a developer, or through the help of Stripe's customer service team to assist in getting you setup. The ease of use time it takes to get up and running is second to none

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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.

Stripe offers a very easy-to-navigate platform with many different functions. From linking it to our website and accounting platform to tracking our payments, being able to issue a refund quickly if required, and setting up QR codes and payment links for subscriptions or one-time donations, it really covers so many aspects that we need and use on a weekly and monthly basis.

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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

Stripe's support is nearly perfect – great attention to detail, fast response times, and a willingness to really dig into issues and get to the bottom of them. In the five years we've been using Stripe, the only negative thing I can say about their customer support is that it seems like there has been a slight shift to less technical front-line support agents, which means it's more likely your issue will have to be escalated before you get more information. This, however, has happened as Stripe rolled out more real-time support features like call and chat, and that really isn't workable if you're escalating everything right off the bat. It's absolutely an acceptable trade-off.

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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.

It took less than an hour to have everything setup and running

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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.

Stripe is easier to use and offers better support and rates. My favorite part with Stripe is probably their ready-to-use plug-in that's offered for me. We have multiple eCommerce stores and we rely on our payment process going smoothly. The plug-in from Stripe is free, constantly updated, secure, and very easy to implement.

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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.

• It makes getting money from your clients really easy
• It gives your clients the guarantee that their payment information is totally secure and confidentially used and kept
• It is very easy to integrate with online assets of the company
• In a couple of occasions, some companies have wanted me to use Stripe for them to pay me, and I have had a couple of hiccups. This was more related to the way that these companies set up the Stripe integration of my account to their platform. In both cases, the integration has not been possible and to this date, I still do not know why with exactitude.
• As I said before, the commissions kept by Stripe could be lower, and shared with the CC companies, rather than having us clients pay for all of o it.

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