MIVA Merchant 5
Review this cart!
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| Company name |
Miva Corporation |
| Product name |
MIVA Merchant 5 |
| Version |
5 |
| Sample customer sites |
http://www.antiki.com/
http://www.shiftoutdoors.com/
http://www.ohbabygifts.com/
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| Price |
$US995 |
| Average review score |
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| User reviews |
Reviewed by: Jonathan Margary
"I try some other shopping cart in the past: Veracart, Shopsite and now Miva. Miva Merchant 5 is the best out there."
Reviewed by: Brian
"I've implemented 2 shopping carts for our online business over the last 2 years (2004, 2005) - www.smartswinggolf.com. Miva was the first. We now use NetSuite. Miva is excellent - especially compared to NetSuite. We have high standards for integrating the look and feel of a shopping cart with our static site. Advanced customization is key and Miva provides it. It's pretty tricky to get some of the more technical stuff working - for instance - how to keep state between store pages and static pages so that "Welcome back, John Smith" appears on every page. Miva user groups are an excellent resource for this. You'll do lots of reading. Miva also provides excellent third party packages for coupon codes and affiliate programs - both of which we used.
In short - Miva was semi-difficult to program for/configure but the custom look and feel and availability of third party plug-in features makes it well worth it.
NetSuite is a nightmare of a cart, by the way. They are a decent back-end software company that decided to go "turn-key" and offer a webstore feature. Unfortunately they have a lot of catching up to do. Still, I am able to fight through the quirkiness and customize to our standards - mostly. By the way, I am a web designer with medium to advanced javascript skills. Javascript is key to getting shopping cart customization under control.
"
Reviewed by: Paul
"I have Miva on 3 stores.When it runs OK wonderful...BUT when it decides to cause problems you are in trouble!I have had several bugs on the different stores.Have used Miva for 3 years or more and want out.It is built on sand somewhere...and sand always shifts.If it were a real bricks amd mortar store health and safety would have closed it long ago!You can never quite trust it lioke a pc with a hidden virus!"
Reviewed by: lenny
"Of the hundreds of developers and designers I work with in the ecommerce business, no ecommerce solution rates lower amongst us. Poor, poor quality, bad code, and extremely hard to setup and use. "
Reviewed by: Damir
"We have been utilizing the Miva Shopping Cart for over a year now at www.netfreez.com. It may be counted as one of the best shopping carts available to date. Furthermore, it is extremely expandable with hundreds of add-on modules available on the Miva website. "
Reviewed by: Jerry
"It is by far the worst shopping cart available on the market today. 1 measly indian support rep providing horrible service. Very challenging to install, even for an IT Professional of over 10 years like myself. Tricky install "way" of making it work since it's not well documented. Poor customer service and support. They just stress that they want to charge more for their own techs to "Install" it for you from india. Definately choose something else! Try OSCommerce. Never again."
Reviewed by: David
"We have been using Miva Merchant (and its predecessor, Kool Kat) for over 10 years, since they first launched it. I can say it has been a source of constant worries all of these years, including a handful of catastrophic failures over the years that cost us a lot of money. Support has ranged from fairly poor, to extremely poor. We are finally moving to a different asp based cart at this time. I should have moved years agos."
Reviewed by: andrew gulli
"This is the worst shopping card that was ever produced. Years ago it was not bad, but the older it gets the more unstable. Tech support is awful. There are many other shopping carts, please don't make the mistake of Miva.
Andrew"
Reviewed by: Karen
"Needs far more programming skill than the marketing material suggests.
However, my main annoyance is that I can't update the software - and it's full of bugs (such as an inventory system that randomly increases the number of items available - ick!) I was told by Miva that the reason I can't update the software is that - "You have modules installed". Now - want to guess who sold me those modules? Yes, Miva of course.
So - they sell, sell, sell you the modules (which in fact are crucial for a lot of basic functionality) then tell you later that you need to deinstall all of them in order to get any updates. What kind of customer service is that?!
"
Reviewed by: Max
"Do not go for Miva! What a useless piece of software.
1) Miva is buggy
2) Lack of documentation
3) Lack of support
4) Miva cant do much without modules, you will have to purchase 10 to 15 modules. Every module will probably break your template."
Reviewed by: Xmivite
"There are no words how bad this cart is - Miva has gone into the marketing side of things - and seem to do the cart as a trivial after thought. As a long time M4 user performance was pathetic but atleast there was good developer mod support - i had decided to go with M5 because my designer was able to design into it.. how wrong and big mistake this was. i had lots of customizations with mods from m4 . after wasting about 2 weeks and almost $1000. i was unable to get my functions in it even using developers scripts and taking active part in miva forums, what i did learn is that m5 is poorly documented leaving deveopers scratching thier heads. and go the forums and the concensus is - m5 is not for m4 users - just new users- well if u cant get your previous functionality into a newer version something is seriously wrong.. Miva was selling M5 as a unlimited ability for customization for deveopers.. well its exact opposite. To tell you how bad it really is i will give you example of what i consider fraud on miva's part. I use a category gallery on my m4 site - just thumbs of the cats. not just a menu calling the first prod in each category dynamically. well if you go to miva's site and look at the demo - they have a cat gallery on in it.. So i thoguht cool - i can do it in M5 - well after i couldnt do it and hired to developers to try to do it and couldnt .. remeber i did it in m4... i went back to the demo and took a peek in the admin and OMG - it was hard coded,.... who the hell is going to have the time to write html by hand when i make product changes.. they had no business representing a demo with somethign that looks to be a function yet is just hard coded. its plain old fraud.. Dont was your time for a second considering this cart.. especially when there are carts like cs-cart out there - with cs- cart i wouldnt wwaste a minute considering anything else its not in the same league as anything.....GO get Cs-Cart and start selling and stop wasting resources.!!"
Add your own review |
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| Supported operating systems |
Windows, Linux, Unix |
| Language |
Custom |
| Database |
MySQL |
| Source code |
Yes |
| Reseller discounts |
Yes |
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| Product limit |
No |
| Category limit |
No |
| Multi-language |
Yes |
| Gift certificates |
Yes |
| Loyalty program |
Yes |
| Email merchant on order |
Yes |
| Affiliates program |
Yes |
| Site search |
Yes |
| Search optimization tools |
Yes |
| Product reviews |
No |
| Newsletters |
Yes |
| Discount coupons |
Yes |
| Customer registrations |
Yes |
| Wish list |
No |
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| Shipping price range |
Yes |
| Shipping weight range |
Yes |
| UPS lookup |
Yes |
| USPS lookup |
Yes |
| Fedex lookup |
Yes |
| Canada Post lookup |
Yes |
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| Tax by state |
Yes |
| Tax by country |
Yes |
| PayPal |
Yes |
| Authorize.Net |
Yes |
| Verisign |
Yes |
| Worldpay |
Yes |
| Secure Trading |
Yes |
| Others |
Yes |
| Non credit card options |
Yes |
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| Customer forums |
Yes |
| Free support |
Yes |
| Paid support |
Yes |
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| Sales reports |
Yes |
| Search reports |
Yes |
| Low stock reports |
Yes |
| Inventory reports |
Yes |
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This is one of the most popular carts on the market. It has a wide range of features and has a lot of 3rd party extras available, but also has a high price tag. It has an excellent user community such as this developers group. |
Last updated:
6/4/2008 4:26:51 AM
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