Miva

• Subscriptions
• Themes
• Pricing and payments
• Checkout pages
• Reporting features

Overall, Miva has some really good features. We felt like, of all the products in the e-commerce industry, Miva was both a website development tool and an e-commerce platform.

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.

Pricing and 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. We really liked 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

We also liked that 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

We also like the number of reporting features with Miva, including Google Analytics support. We found that 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.

• Barriers
• Trial period
• Overage policy
• Mobile app

One of the biggest issues we found with Miva was that there was a lot of red tape in place before you could get rolling with your e-commerce store.

Barriers

There are a lot of barriers that you have to navigate before you get your store setup:

• Inputting a lot of personal and business information.
• Registering or transferring an existing domain name.
• Multiple emails as you validate your business information and enter payment information.

Trial Period

The free trial period with Miva is pretty sketchy. It's not really a free trial period, as you get charged for your first month's subscription. If you decide to cancel within the first 30 days, your account will get refunded. Some customers, in other reviews from around the web, didn't realize that they would be charged for their free trial period.

Overage Policy

We also didn't like the overage policy with Miva. If you go over your allotted space or bandwidth, you get $2 GB fee per transfer and $2 per 100 MB of storage. If you have a big site, this can increase your already pricey monthly fee. We found that other providers in the industry did offer unlimited storage and bandwidth for their lower-end subscriptions.

Mobile App

Miva also charges a lot to build a mobile app for your e-commerce store. We found that an app for your store costs $1795.00, built through a customized design process.