Miva Merchant Review – Is It a Right Choice for Online Stores?

Miva Merchant has a long development history which can be dated back to 1996. Since then, this hosted ecommerce solution has been developing and updating constantly. A mounting number of people are inclined to Miva Merchant for their online business, especially those who want to build professional sites or enterprise sites.

However, there are still many people who have an interest in this platform holding wait-and-see attitude because of a lack of adequate information of it. With the purpose of offering webmasters a comprehensive reference of Miva Merchant, we have spent dozes of days in trying and monitoring it. Based on what we found out and other users’ comments, we work out a full-scale and conductive review as bellow.

Pricing

Just like AmeriCommerce, Miva Merchant is also charged for its easy-to-use functionality. To be specific, it offers 3 packages with different prices and no requirement of setup fee and contract. Besides, all the packages support 30-day money back guarantee, which means that after enrolling, you can receive a full refund when you determine to cancel the service within the first 30 days. The basic features of these 3 ones are as follows:

• Boutique charging $49.95/mo includes 10 email accounts, 10GB data transfer, unlimited products, free domain name and SSL for first year.
• Marketplace charging $79.95/mo includes 30 email accounts, 20GB data transfer, unlimited products, free domain name and GeoTrust SSL Premium for first year.
• Warehouse charging $129.95/mo includes unlimited email accounts, 40GB data transfer, unlimited products, free domain name and GeoTrust SSL TrueBusiness for first year.

Store Design & Managment

Using Miva Merchant with its CSS-based templates and themes, you are able to specialize and beautify your own store. In detailed, this solution enables you to use Bootstrap Theme and responsive templates to design a site starting with a blank CSS-based structure.

Moreover, there are many custom fields for you to create, including product, category, order, customer management and more. More importantly, this platform includes PA-DSS checklist, easy WordPress integration and Configurable SMTP server.

Purchasing Experience

It is crucial for you to provide customers a satisfied purchasing experience. You are able to use built-in lightbox to better display products with multiple images and photos. Besides, Miva Merchant enables you to show products sorted by many options like best-seller, newest item, highest price and lowest price.

Additionally, one-page checkout offered by the platform not only eases your selling process but also brings consumers much convenience. Moreover, its automated order status update and reordering system make it easy for you to encourage those shoppers who abandon their cart temporarily to complete purchases.

Payment and Shipping

Miva Merchant allows you to accept both real-time and non-real-time payment methods. Especially, your customers have approach to purchase products with over 13 payment gateways including Authorize.net, PayPal, paylow link, check, credit card and others. As for shipping, it supports 4 main modules, namely, USPS, UPS, FedEx and CanadaPost.

Besides, you do not need to worry about the whole shipping process because this ecommerce platform is integrated with many shipping calculators and tax calculators. Specifically, the 5 shipping calculators allow you to choose suitable shipping methods based on zone, price, weight and quantity. Moreover, the various tax calculators ensure an efficient tax management, such as Avatara, VTA, generic sales tax and more.

SEO & Marketing

Miva Merchants provides you an approach to search engine optimization by supporting customizable link structure, automatic site map, dynamic meta tags, indexable content and total control of page structure. However, it does not support multiple selling channels yet like eBay and Amazon. Besides, other social media integration carries additional fee.

To assist you to adjust selling strategy, this solution supports all major analytics platforms like Google Analytics and offers a comprehensive reporting covering gross sales report, products sales report, export sales data and much more.

Other Highlights and Shortcomings

Customer service and technical support are the main strengths of Miva Merchant. To be specific, the support team is available for 7 days a week by phone, email and others. Particularly, if you call them, you can get an immediate response and solution. Meanwhile, it offers many conductive references of this platform like technical documentations, video tutorials and community forums.

However, there are still plenty of people who are unsatisfied with some aspects of Miva Merchant. Specifically, it charges added fees for some features like Google advertising and domain registration fee from the second year. Besides, they think its built-in admin design and templates are outdated. Also, for many ecommerce beginners, it is complex for them to navigate the admin smoothly.

Summary

According to our all-around review above, we conclude that Miva Merchant is worth trying for online business. If you are running a big business, it is a favorable choice as an ecommerce solution due to its user-friendly features like site design, considerate shipping process and others.

However, if you want to find an affordable platform with more powerful marketing plans and more stunning templates for your small or medium business, you may try other choices like PrestaShop and TomatoCart. Since the reliable hosting server is the backbone of these eCommerce software, we recommend the following leading eCommerce web hosting companies which offer cost-effective hosting services.