Miva vs. Unbounce

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is not responsible for any losses or damages resulting from any interruption or termination of the Services due to outdated or incorrect payment information.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

As I am using this platform for a long time, I believe I am happy with the services I am getting from this outstanding software. It has made my landing page experience better than ever without any coding knowledge to apply. It has upgraded my business in a positive direction and I believe I am using this software for many years to come.

Incentivized

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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.

• AB testing is simple to set up. Clone a page make your changes and pit one or more against each other. Set the number of views and you're told the winner once the test is done. Simple
• Tracking code is easy to add. Follow the straightforward instructions in the back end
• Easy to add multiple domains to your account. So you can use the landing pages you build on numerous sites if you so desire

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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.

• One of the cons of Unbouncewas the learning curve. We are very familiar now with the ends and outs but in the beginning, it would have been super helpful to have some sore of learning up front.
• The pricing structure is not great for our particular organization. We will never need unlimited page views but we do often need more landing pages we make it work but the pricing model could be improved.
• The reporting could be a little better. We supplement with some of our own trackings but for the most part, the reporting from Unbounce is a basic level understanding of how the page is performing.

Incentivized

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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.

The nonprofit discount makes it so affordable that my client was happy to continue their subscription all year round. They have used it to build landing pages to capture expressions of interest for their next recruitment window. It hasn't quite produced the sort of results we were hoping for, but I'm not sure that's Unbounce's fault.

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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.

Unbounce made it easy for my team to build landing pages for website and email. We gained valuable A/B testing insights and gathered information from visitors effectively converting them to leads. The Editor is straight forward and I was able to learn to use it on my own without instruction. CRM integration was easy and consistently worked.

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

Unbounce customer support is very strong. We have been able to connect with them via email and telephone mediums. They are very knowledgeable and can effectively help resolve difficult problems that are slowing us down. Overall Unbounce customer support is very professional. Our wait times have always been small or at least reasonable.

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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.

Choose a subdomain that is appropriate for multiple types of pages. You don't want to have to keep changing it. Think about using Google Tag Manager to manage your Google Analytics code and event tracking. Build one landing page to completion. Then make a copy of it if you need to create variant pages.

Incentivized

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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.

Despite my review for unbounce being not the greatest review or score in the world, when stacked up against its two biggest competitors, I'd prefer Unbounce over Leadpages and Instapage. Leadpages drag and drop editor, integrations, and overall UI/UX is 10x worse than unbounce and unbounce really leads in the category of nice templates and quickness to a production landing page with much better options and integrations.

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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.

• Unbounce has positively impacted PPC Director's ability to provide clientele with the service of building informative, relevant, and high-converting landing pages. For instance, the traceable effectiveness of landing pages built by PPC Director in Unbounce remains directly correlated to long-term client retention.

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