Miva Reviews

How many products are in the store? What type of products do you sell,
and do they have any variations/attributes (eg size, color, model #,
etc)? How much traffic does your store get monthly, or what are your monthly sales? What methods of
payment do you offer? What shipping methods do you offer for your
orders? Do you offer affiliate accounts? How custom of a design are you looking for?

Miva is very well suited for small business to enterprise level business sites or for stores that require lots of customization.

Totally depends on the business – I suppose long-term business goals are questions that need to be asked to determine if a less sophisticated cart should be used, or if the client would have to re-platform, if his business grows. Totally depends on the business

Few scenarios would cause me to steer a client toward another platform for a catalog or eCommerce project. Other than the monthly hosting cost (generally around $50 per month for MIVA), comparable platforms offer no great benefit over MIVA. I do have clients that have opted to have small eCommerce projects developed in WordPress, which does often have a lower cost and shorter production time. I would also offer the WordPress option to clients selling soft goods or needing a responsive site as these aren't MIVA features yet.

If you need an e-commerce system that is flexible and full featured at a reasonable price point I would say Miva Merchant is very hard to beat.

In general, unless someone has a tiny business, or expects minimal growth (and why are they in business? is it a hobby?) - I would recommend Miva Merchant. They are solid out of the box, support has gotten very good after a number of years of improvement, and there is room from growth - so you don't have to switch systems when your business grows faster than expected, or you go through a significant change (such as B2C moving to B2B etc.). Miva Merchant is very scalable.

I think MIVA Merchant is best for large, standalone stores. It allows for more tweaking of code than a lot of ecommerce software that I have used. Even though the interface isn't the gold standard, there still something to be said for the number of options it has and the number of modules available.

However, I think it's probably not the best solution if you just need a small, simple store. There are other software packages out there that can do the job a little more efficiently and cheaply.

Hands down this is the best shopping cart on the market for small, medium, and large online stores. The ability to easily scale up or down in size makes this a favorable shopping cart for all. Some great resources for getting started can be found here:
Miva Training Videos: http://www.mivamerchant.com/videos
Miva's Documentation (PDF): http://www.mivamerchant.com/pdf/MivaPR8_09-01-13.pdf
Miva's Official Forum http://extranet.miva.com/forums/

There is only one Module I know that allows you to sell Soft Goods or Down Loads with Miva Merchant. This is a big weakness. You cannot make and easy Subscription Site with Miva Merchant.

You pretty much have to host with Miva Merchant it you are a reseller for Miva Merchant. They have made the licensing cost prohibitive to be a reseller for Miva Merchant.

I think Miva is a perfect solution for many businesses. I would hesitate to recommend it to a small business who wants to maintain it themselves without the assistance of either an internal or third-party web developer. For example, some one-person businesses need a very turnkey solution and are willing to sacrifice certain features in favor of a more plug-and-play shopping cart. Miva does have a bit of a learning curve, and some technical expertise is useful. Aside from that, I think it works for most businesses. It is PCI/PA-DSS compliant. Once you've learned SMT and/or MivaScript, it's easy to customize either the look and feel, or the functionality. And it's robust enough for enterprise applications.

If you only have a few items - maybe less than 10-15, use something simpler. But if you're going to list more, this is the platform you want.

The cost to develop was great for a medium size business.

Size of the store - For a very small store, and very simple store, Miva might be too expensive, and an open source solution such as Zen Cart or Magento might be indicated. As far as I know, there is no limit on how big a store can get

I am aware of some interesting applications of the Miva platform where it may be the optimal choice, but for the vast majority of store owners the negatives greatly outweigh the positives, and, despite some skilled and personable staff, management seems unwilling to make changes that might set the platform, and their official hosting arm, on a better course. Unfortunately, given the fevered competition among eCommerce platforms, I don't really see how they might turn things around unless there's major changes made at the top of Miva and their basic approach to maintaining their system.

It's really important for the Miva Merchant site, once built, to be able to be passed onto the client to be able to manager on their own. Is it easy for a client to be able to go in and be able to edit their own e-commerce?

Features, user interface, and flexibility of the software