One of the best ecommerce shopping carts available
Overall Satisfaction with Miva Merchant
I use Miva Merchant as an ecommerce solution for my clients. Miva Merchant is easily capable of handling everything from smaller stores/individual sales to large and enterprise level businesses. The design is fully customizable in Miva, so I can implement my own or others' custom designs into a store and also adjust the code for SEO, google snippets, etc. Miva is extremely secure and passes all PCI/PDA-SS requirements which is extremely important. Miva is fully compatible with a number of popular third-party services like PayPal, Power Reviews, Shipworks, Authorize.net, etc and can be easily integrated with others.
Pros
- Expandable Functionality: Store functionality (gift certificates, coupons, shipping,etc) can be customized via code on the page templates, or third-party services/modules can be integrated to add features. Even better is that more and more of the third-party features are being built into the core features with new releases!
- Design: The store design can be fully customized to accommodate almost any design elements. Access to the page template code allows you to make customizations such as adding third-party code snippets (order tracking, live chat software, etc), adding if/then logic statements for dynamic customization, or to add a full custom design to the entire store.
- Security: PCI/PDA-SS compliant - There are not a lot of carts out there that are fully PCI compliant, and this is especially critical now (credit card companies are really beginning to crack down on this).
Cons
- 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.
- Clients are able to easily make changes to products/categories, and they are able to control many other aspects of the site with additional customizations (and additional features that Miva adds in with new releases...) Products/categories can be mass-uploaded via a flat file (eg excel spreadsheet, text file, etc) to add/update thousands of products at a time which definitely makes for increased efficiency.
- Clients have excellent support available whether directly through Miva support or the strong online Miva community. If there's a problem with something, you're not stranded by yourself with no way out or completely relying on an open source community.
Miva Merchant can be customized to fit nearly any design, and it has nearly unlimited custom stand-alone, product and category pages for unique and varying layouts. With some other carts, they don't always allow much, if any, design customization outside of the few options or templates they give you. Also, Miva is fully PCI compliant which is a VERY big deal over other shopping cart systems out there.
Using Miva Merchant
1 - Web Design & Development/Sales/Project Management/Tech Support
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