Easy for Beginners to Use, Powerful Enough for Larger Businesses, Flexible Enough to Meet Specialized Needs
July 26, 2022
Easy for Beginners to Use, Powerful Enough for Larger Businesses, Flexible Enough to Meet Specialized Needs
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Miva Merchant
I'm a software engineer, not a merchant. I've been working with Miva for more than 20 years. My specialty is writing plug-in modules that customize the store's behavior. Miva Merchant is extremely versatile and flexible. It's quite powerful and easy to use out of the box, but modules can do anything you can imagine to enhance your site and streamline your workflow. A module can change the way your products are displayed, provide special fees or discounts, and modify shipping costs. It can connect to other servers to upload or download data, so you don't have to do it by hand. I'm not aware of any other e-commerce package that can beat Miva in this. The company is big enough to be stable and reliable, but small enough that they treat customers like real human beings. They have some very smart people in charge, and the top executives even answer my emails personally (although I'm careful not to abuse the privilege). There's also an active user community, and a set of Web forums where experienced users answer questions for newbies. The company also participates in these.
- One of my clients sells online professional training courses. I wrote a module for him that lets customers take their exams on the Web site. It saves their work, computes their score, and even prints out a diploma when they pass.
- Miva Merchant has built-in support for the most common payment processors ( PayPal Authorize.net, etc.) and shipping carriers (UPS, FedEx, Post Office, etc.). But if you want to use one that they don't support, I can write you a module for that. Or I may have one already that will work for you; I've written a lot of them.
- Miva Merchant isn't just for online shopping. Some merchants use it to handle telephone orders, or for purchases in their brick-and-mortar stores. I've written modules to help with this.
- As a software engineer, I find their technical documentation to be sketchy and hard to use. But that's only a problem for those of us who write modules or do other deep dives into the internal functioning.
- It's been the main focus of my business for 20 years
Do you think Miva delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Miva's feature set?
Yes
Did Miva live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Miva go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Miva again?
Yes