Miva Hires Melanie Kalemba

These are exciting times for the ecommerce industry. Consumers spent more than $450 billion for retail purchases on the web in 2017, an increase of 16 percent over 2016. In the last quarter of 2017, the U.S. Commerce Department found the strongest year-over-year growth in ecommerce in six years. Consumers have clearly embraced the convenience, selection and competitive pricing found in online shopping.

But there is much more to the ecommerce story than just satisfied consumers. Behind the scenes, businesses are discovering that enterprise ecommerce platforms can provide them with new ways to manage their supply chain, expand their markets and increase their ROI. However, in the past this functionality was only available through custom development, putting the tools out of reach for most smaller and mid-sized companies.

After spending two decades in strategic sales, marketing and partnership development roles at technology companies, what excited me about joining Miva is how much cutting edge enterprise functionality is built directly into the Miva platform. Businesses that would have never been able to afford to invest the time and money in custom development now have access to a personalized and constantly evolving ecommerce ecosystem right out of the virtual box.

Perhaps Miva’s most revolutionary feature is how it blurs the line between B2B and B2C. With customized logins, ecommerce stores can differentiate pricing, promotions, shipping and payments between B2B and B2C customers on the same platform. This gives wholesalers a way to open up direct-to-consumer sales, while still offering specialized services to their core clients. It also gives B2C sites a way to expand and manage their distribution channels.

What does this mean for Miva customers? It means they don’t have to rely on apps or plugins since so many tools are available with Miva’s native functionality. For B2B sellers, it’s easy to add tools make it faster for wholesale customers to place complex large orders. At the same time, Miva offers B2C retailers the bells and whistles they want to showcase their products and their brand identity. And all customers benefit from logic-based functions to automatically display if a product is sold out.

Integrating operations provides a host of benefits, including the ability to automatically sync products and inventory with ERP and accounting systems. Many brick-and-mortar retailers and offline-only wholesalers have been wary about moving to online systems because of concern about managing two sets of books and inventory systems. With Miva, they don’t have to.

I was particularly pleased to see how high Miva is rating for customer support. Miva topped G2 Crowd’s Relationship Index for Ecommerce Platforms for Spring 2018, with a 93% rating for Quality of Support, high above the average of 83%. Miva also topped the Results Index, with particularly high marks for Average User Adoption – a score of 95% compared to the average of 76%. The ROI scores were particularly attractive, with Time to Go Live in only 1.9 months (the average was 3.1) and returning an investment in only 7.3 months instead of the average of 11.1.

You’ll Be Hearing More About Miva

Miva has been called “the largest ecommerce company you’ve never heard of.” My job will be to change that. I will be overseeing Miva’s brand awareness campaigns, including demand generation and partner marketing.

While I was at BigCommerce, I launched their enterprise sales operation. At Miva, I’ll be focusing on accelerating and expanding adoption by enterprise customers with revenue between $1 and $100 million.

Even ecommerce insiders are surprised to hear that Miva Merchant has processed more than $100 billion in gross merchant volume since it launched two decades ago. As the ecommerce industry expands and Miva’s adoption increases, that number will climb substantially.

I’m looking forward to strengthening Miva’s presence in the market and helping ecommerce sellers transform their businesses online and off.