Miva is the creator of a premium ecommerce platform for modern enterprise business. To date, Miva software has powered more than $100 billion in online sales worldwide, leveraging content and complex data into sophisticated site UI, state-of-the-art transaction and inventory management, and strong systems integration. Miva’s in-house development and design team empowers a global community of store owners, web developers, and designers to build innovative omni-channel B2B and B2C businesses. Miva’s unique hybrid SaaS technology combines the ease of use and trusted security of SaaS with the flexibility and rich functionality found in Open Source and On-Premise systems. Miva’s native functionality includes a rich assortment of shopping and merchandising tools that reduce the need for third-party plug-ins.
Benefits
There are so many variables attached to an E-commerce website and Miva addresses to most of them. Design your platform architecture the way you like. This platform is scalable to any business size making it useful for large enterprises as well as growing businesses. The data is hosted by the providers themselves relieving you from the worries of maintenance and support to a great extent.
Highly customizable and responsive, Miva interface is highly flexible and responsive. Whether you have a furniture shop or a pharmacy, the customization options are endless. Libraries and search options make it easier for your customers to get to their desired products.
Presentation is the key to success for E-commerce websites. Miva has some attractive themes allowing you to display unlimited products. Show them in tabs or in a visual library. You get to make product bundles while managing all the prices.
Just to make sure that your online store appears on search engines, SEO solutions and keyword based indexing from Miva come in handy so that you stay ahead of your counterparts. It focuses on making clean URLs with easy linking of pages on your website.
You can maintain your customers’ accounts for quicker transactions. Integrations with top payment services will make it easier for your customers during online payment. Inventory monitoring allows you to look into availability of items. There are also prompt notifications regarding stock levels so that you never run out of stock.
Ease of Use
When you first sign up for Miva, you’ll enter your personal information along with a credit card number. You will be billed immediately. Then a set-up Wizard will guide you through creating a new (or implementing an old) domain name with the “you-may-log-in” email minutes after signing up. In the meantime, you can get started learning about the admin with Miva’s (very helpful) video tour. Miva also sends daily step-by-step emails to guide a beginner merchant through setting up their store.
Although Miva’s admin is not very simple but it would be an effective tool after you overcome the slight learning curve. Here’s a look of Miva’s dashboard:
Adding products, images, categories, and attributes is fairly straight-forward. It’s mostly point and click, and uploading images works the same as it would on your favorite social media site. You may have to look into the up-to-date support documentation to figure out more complex features.
You can create discounts and coupons by first creating “Price Groups.” As you can see below, you can set price groups to apply to a specific product, an entire basket, or shipping costs. You can also create more complex Buy X Get Y discounts and volume pricing discounts.
There’s additional technical support available to get you all set up. Documentation is easily accessible from the main dashboard page. And, if the initial admin tour video isn’t enough, there are lots of short tutorial videos to help you figure out different functions in the backend. Here are a few of the categories that those videos cover.
In addition to the admin, every merchant has access to my.miva, which has settings for your billing information, domain management, website settings, and SSL certificates. You can also access customer support from my.miva and delete your account in case you decide that Miva Merchant isn’t right for you before the month is up.
Key Features
- Modern omnichannel shopping experience
- Flexible fully-customizable architecture
- All-inclusive cloud hosting
- Full service in-house digital agency
- Complete integration with data systems
- Native B2B support
- Safe secure transactions and payments
- Low total cost of ownership
- Dedicated support 24/7/365
- More stable than open-source platforms
Subscriptions
With each Miva subscription level, for example, you can get a limited number of email addresses for different departments and decision makers within your organization. While many other providers offered a subdomain with the platform’s domain name, you get a free domain name with your Miva subscription (free for the first year). You also get a free SSL certificate, either RapidSSL or GeoTrust, depending upon your subscription level. Here are some of the other features of Miva:
- Unlimited products for each subscription level.
- High bandwidth amount for each subscription level: 10 GB, 20 GB, and 40 GB, respectively.
- Affordable pricing, scalable to your business.
Themes
One of the things that worried us about Miva is the limited number of themes. There are four themes available with Miva:
- Iron and Wool Ready Theme
- Retro Ready Theme
- Optics Ready Theme
- Suivant Ready Theme
There is technically a “fifth” theme, the basic version. Many Miva customers use this theme and customize it for their business. We found that even though the themes are somewhat limited, they are pretty customizable. We found that each theme demo and the explanation of each theme eased our fears about the limited number of themes available.
Payments
All of the Miva subscriptions come with a feature called “enterprise-level pricing.” You can easily make price groups to create features and discounts. You can also use the discount and marketing engine to manage coupons, volume pricing, and free shipping.
Customers really like the number of payment options available with Miva. Miva’s partnership with Chase Paymentech supports all the major credit cards, including:
- Visa
- American Express
- MasterCard
- Discover
You can also enable other payment options with Miva, including PayPal and Amazon.
Checkout Pages
The checkouts pages with Miva are streamlined and simplified. There are some situations where you customers want to check out with just one easy process. Other payment portal pages need to be more complicated for different industries, and these businesses can make a three or four page checkout. Overall, we feel like Miva’s customized checkout process can help you reduce the number of abandoned carts for your customers.
Reporting Features
The number of reporting features with Miva, including Google Analytics support. The internal analytics tools with Miva include:
- Visual graphs.
- Gross sales reports, including products sales reports (with best sellers).
- Geographic sales information.
- Sales data export as .csv or .xls.
- Custom reporting with multiple categories.
Integrations and Add-Ons
Miva has partnered with many of the most common eCommerce services. Setting up integrations with these partners is easy. You can take a look at Miva’s full list of business partners on the website or glance at my shortened list below.
- Avalara’s AvaTax: Automatic tax calculation.
- SearchSpring: Internal site search solution.
- CloudFlare: Security service, featuring a CDN (Content Delivery Network), DDoS attack mitigation, web application firewall, and content acceleration.
- PowerReviews Express: Customer reviews solution.
- MailChimp: Email marketing automation.
- Shipwire: Order fulfilment service.
- GoDataFeed: Automatic product listing across multiple shopping comparison engines.
You can find hundreds of add-ons available as applications in Miva’s storefront, or you can hire developers to build a connection for you using Miva’s API.
Support
Miva offers unlimited phone and email support on all hosting plans, free of charge. They’re quick to specify that their phone support is based in the US.
The support main page is a gateway to:
- Web Tickets
- Documentation
- Community Forums
- Video Tutorials
- Wishlist Request
- Report a Bug
- Patches & Downloads
- Sign Up for Support Service Club- VIP support costs $149.95/month and includes a dedicated phone line and priority support.
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Contact
Information:
- Sales Email
- Support Email
- Phone: 800.608.6482 (Available during normal business hours)
Miva’s support team is reportedly quick to respond and well-informed. Tech support subscriptions are also available to merchants who decide on Miva’s self-hosted option.
Security
Miva is both PCI level 3.0 compliant and PA-DSS compliant. Every Miva store comes with a free SSL certificate for the first year, but you’ll have to purchase your own in subsequent years. Read more about your SSL certificate options.
Pricing
Miva offers a “Free 30-Day Trial.” But to access that trial you have to enter your credit card information and purchase a month-long plan. If you cancel that plan before 30 days are up, you’ll receive a full refund. Alternatively, you can sign up for a developer account. This account will let you try out a demo store, without the need to enter any payment information
Miva’s pricing structure is based on revenue from your previous twelve months of sales (or estimated revenue if you’ve been selling for less than a year). You can determine which plan you qualify for by checking with the “Annual Merchant Revenue” scale in the graphic below.
Starter for Merchants with Annual Revenue $0 — $99,999.99
- $79.95/month
- 2GB online storage
- 20GB bandwidth
- 2 Admin seats
- 1 year free Rapid SSL ($49 after the first year)
- 1 year free domain
- Unlimited products
Business for Merchants with Annual Revenue $100k — $499,999.99
- $249.95/month
- 5GB online storage
- 100GB bandwidth
- 3 Admin seats
- 1 year free GeoTrustSSL Premium ($149 after the first year)
- 1 year free domain
Professional for Merchants with Annual Revenue $500k — $999,999.99
- $749.95/month
- 10GB online storage
- 250GB bandwidth
- 5 Admin seats
- 1 year free GeoTrustSSL TrueBusiness ($199/yr after the first year)
- 1 year free domain
- Custom dedicated environment
- VIP tech support
- Service Level Agreement
Enterprise for Merchants with Annual Revenue $1 Million+
- $1,495/month
- 20GB online storage
- 1,000GB bandwidth
- 10 Admin seats
- GeoTrust TrueBusiness EV SSL ($199/yr after the first year)
- 1 year free domain
- Dedicated environment
- VIP tech support
- VIP Account Manager
- Service Level Agreement
When you sign up for your plan, you’ll receive a free SSL certificate and domain name, but you should expect to pay for both the domain name and the SSL certificate after the first year.
While Miva does not charge any transaction fees, they do charge for bandwidth and storage overages. The current fees are $2/month for every additional GB of bandwidth and $15/month for every GB of disk space. Miva’s pricing plans are designed to estimate the amount of bandwidth and storage you’ll need, so hopefully, you won’t face too many overage charges. But, if you regularly use more than your plan allows, you can always purchase additional bandwidth and storage space in your my.miva account. Also, you can add on extra admin seats (the number of users your admin allows at once) for $50/seat/month.
Competitors
Shopify
Shopify may be a more commonly-used platform, with a larger community around it. You will find plenty of resources, such as community-developed add-ons, themes, and so on available to you. Some observers contend that Shopify offers more — but that what they offer is fragmented and “stitched” together over the years, vs. being part of a well-thought-out and well-engineered total platform.
For those just starting out in e-commerce, and looking for branded merchandise or experimenting in drop-shipping Shopify may be a good choice. Shopify offers plug-in connections with producers of on-demand merchandise like t-shirts, laptop skins, coffee mugs and more. However, you do have to mark these items up significantly in order to make a profit. Oberlo is a plug-in that enables instant drop-shopping.
3dCart
3dcart began development in the 1990s out of the eCommerce programming experience of Gonzalo Gil, founder and CEO. Gonzalo conceived of 3dcart as the shopping cart software that would bring together all the most-demanded eCommerce features, especially those absent from other platforms. 3dcart is headquartered in Tamarac, Florida and continues to innovate through advanced features at the forefront of eCommerce. With 3dcart, you decide when your growing business is ready to move up to the next tier, and scale up at your own pace— not ours. We’ll never penalize you for success by arbitrarily deciding you should pay more because your profits have grown.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin. And it’s available for free. Packed full of features, perfectly integrated into your self-hosted WordPress website. It’s professionally built for commercial purpose with frequent bug fixes and upgrades. Easy to setup and use in any part of the world. It’s free, stable, open source and frequently updated. It integrates with almost every major payment processor in the world.
Summing Up
Miva Merchant is a highly preferred eCommerce solution for modern businesses. Regardless of your business size, Miva brings some great features to the table you cannot ignore. Normally E-commerce systems are unable to provide best price value but with Miva, the gaps between quality and price have been cut down a great deal.
Offering high user feasibility and convenience, Miva has been providing services to some of the most renowned businesses all over United States. It has been behind $100 billion sales over a period of 19 years. Overall the product free of cost, you can take an online tour to familiarize with the features and offerings in this software. Some highly customizable automation options and sales assistance ensure that you stay ahead of the eight ball.
Hence it is not at all a bad choice; just remember to always read through a company’s Terms of Service before you sign on with them, so you know what you can expect. If you’re unsatisfied, you can take advantage of the 30-day money back guarantee and get a full refund.