Merchant’s Perspective – Used Miva For Many Years, But Had To Move On
Rating: 1 out of 10
March 20, 2015
Vetted Review
Verified User
3 years of experience
Established retail company launched an online store with Miva Merchant over 5 years ago. Early on it was a very suitable platform and met our needs well, particularly its somewhat unique versatility. However, things have been in steady decline for some time. Their hosting was incredibly unreliable and lacked critical management features for no good reason. What you get initially with Miva is really only the shell of a proper online store. Things have gradually gotten better in regard to the features included, but companies who've been on the platform for years and paid for third-party modules and specialized development work receive no benefit. They're consistently about three years behind the pack compared to other major eCommerce platforms and have recently resorted to questionable tactics to increase the revenue they derive from people who use their system. I do feel some online merchants with highly specialized needs could find the customization options offered by Miva compelling, but the start up and ongoing costs for a real storefront are quite severe and lack many useful features compared to other more popular store systems.
- General versatility, though changes commonly require the aid of a true Miva developer to implement
- Compatible with many payment gateways and a fair assortment of third-party services
- Developers employed directly by Miva to handle merchant projects are personable and responsive to most requests
Cons
- 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.