A Shopping Cart Solution for Online Businesses of Any Size
Updated December 04, 2014
A Shopping Cart Solution for Online Businesses of Any Size
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
I have sed v4 and v5
Modules Used
- Emporium Plus Toolkit
- Product/Category Template Manager
- Template Data Feed
- Google Analytics
- SearchSpring
- MailChimp
- Order Status Manager
- and much much more.....
Overall Satisfaction with Miva Merchant
I currently offer E-Commerce consulting, marketing, and management services for a broad range of online companies most of which are using Miva Merchant as their shopping cart platform. The online stores I work with are offering anywhere from 20 to 180,000 products online. The shopping cart is primarily used to merchandise products and as a CMS system.Some of the more challenging issues my clients face are work arounds for MAP Pricing (Minimum Advertised Pricing), integrating in-house POS systems with Miva to manage inventory, and integrating live LTL freight rates directly into the shopping cart. All of these feats can be achieve but may require you to think outside of the box. The good thing about Miva is that you are only limited by your imagination as far as what you can do with the platform.
- Miva Merchant is extremely robust and has very few limitations unlike most other shopping carts.
- Offers the most bang for your buck! You can run a multimillion dollar online store using their smallest package at $50 per month with ease. No joke!
- There are many 3rd party modules available for added flexibility.
- Support staff is great and you can find answers to many questions in their forum (where senior techs tend to hang out). Video tutorials are available too!
- There is a learning curve and newbies must have patience when setting up a new store out of the box.
- I was never a big fan of the mobile layout. Fortunately a Responsive design is now available (and rocks)!
- The ability to tie into 3rd party POS systems more easily would be a nice added feature (but I guess that would require the POS system to be integration friendly as well).
- Using Miva Merchant I have generated $1,000,000 in online revenue within the first year, twice (at two different companies).
- The built in SEO Friendly links and ability to import/export Meta Tags allowed me to more easily index well for highly competitive keywords in Google's natural SERP's.
- Miva's built in payment modules allowed my clients to easily accept all major credit cards, PayPal, and Amazon all at checkout which was a contributing factor to higher conversion rates.
The closest solution I found to Miva is Magento. Magento seems to be gaining popularity at a rapid pace but I think this is only because they have done a better job at marketing their product (it's an eBay Company). When comparing the two I gave the slight edge to Miva because of it's ability to accomplish tasks "outside of the box" were easier and cost less. In addition you can host Miva on a dedicated server for $440 per month while using Magento's Enterprise edition cost waaaay more than that.