Miva vs. VWO

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is not responsible for any losses or damages resulting from any interruption or termination of the Services due to outdated or incorrect payment information.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

It works better for either small or big companies because small companies can start with the free plan which is very decent and has everything they need. Also for big companies who get the best paid plans they get a lot of premium functionalities, the insight module, outstanding reports. But for medium size companies who can only afford the basic paid plan, it may not be the best tool as it is very limited. For example, they cannot analize a/b tests for new and ruturning visitors, neither based on the users device category.

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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.

• VWO is pretty easy to implement on websites and doesn't require a heavy technology lift
• The VWO interface is pretty intuitive and let's non-technical users make variants for testing
• The VWO reporting dashboard is excellent for determining statistical significance and understanding whether differences in conversion rates are meaningful or not

Incentivized

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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.

• The user interface within VWO does take a bit of time to get used to, especially as it pertains to switching back and forth between tests. When running multiple experiments on a site at a time, a clear and succinct dashboard for everything in one place would be helpful (as opposed to needing to switch between A/B, multivariate, etc).

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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.

It's great value and we think we've ironed out all the major teething troubles. However, if we experience any more bugs or problems that significantly slow us down then we're seriously considering switching to Optimizely, which I haven't personally tested but have heard great things about from my CRO peers

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.

I gave Visual Website Optimizer a rating of 8 because it is overall a great product to use. Setting up and keeping track of various tests is easy and straight forward. The only reason why this product is not rated higher is because the support documents online leave a lot of room for improvement.

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 have not experienced an application error or unplanned outage with VWO.

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VWO doesn't appear to slow down our website at all, though some customers with adblockers like UBlock Origin have been known to not see entire pages if VWO is making changes to the page at a macro level (background, font, etc). This is rare though.

Incentivized

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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

While their online document support is lacking a simple email to their support team will almost always get responded to the next day. It has however taken more than one email to explain the problem to the support team till they understood the problem. The solution I was given also only half fixed the problem the rest I figured out on my own.

Training was good, just limited to the onboarding process. They walked through all of the steps it takes to get started in VWO and each of the modules, along with giving us ideas for starting our first test. I feel like it could be better if there was a guided process within the VWO program to continue to educate you along the way, and a way to turn that off for experienced users.

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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.

Overall, the implementation of VWO is straightforward. If you've got a straightforward way of deploying code to all of your test pages, either a good CMS or a TMS, then implementation should be a breeze. There is no tweaking to be done to the code itself, and once deployed it has the flexibility to cope with different VWO modules (tracking, conversion analysis, session analysis) without modification.

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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.

There are significant differences in each platform when it comes to Optimizely and vwo. From a functionality and performance perspective they each have their pros and cons. It is important to go through the feature sets of each and ensure the solution you select will work specifically with your business objectives and conversion rate optimization goals

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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.

The product seems infinitely scalable for our needs (small business) and we've never had any issue with loading VWO-edited elements. I will say, though, that online customers with ad blockers have been known to not see certain VWO elements as their third-party scripts are disabled.

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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.

• The ability to offer a CRO service is greatly enhanced by VWO, as it allows us to run tests for clients
• The editor means to some extent we don't need much developer resource to run the tests, lowering costs of doing so

Incentivized

Invited by TrustRadius (TR) on Vendor's Behalf

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