When it comes to shopping cart solutions for online business, there are literally over 600 choices on the market. From free scripts you can download and customize like PayPal all the way up to multi-million dollar custom enterprise solutions written just for your business.
The big problem with so many choices is that virtually all of them claim to do the same thing. It can be very hard both for ecommerce vendors like Miva Merchant and for merchants who are shopping for the right fit for their business to separate the wheat from the chaff. All too often by the time a online business owner realizes they made the wrong choice it is far too late and they’ve invested too much time, money and process into their platform to consider switching.
Miva Merchant 5.5 Allows Almost Unlimited Variety Of Customization Options
Miva Merchant is right for tens of thousands of online businesses doing billions of dollars per year in ecommerce transactions for a few simple but critical reasons:
- Reliability: When you poll Miva Merchant customers about why they’re so loyal to the platform, at the top of the list is reliability. With a 13-year and growing track record, your ecommerce provider should be like your bank, something you never worry about. Miva Merchant combines the ease of use and deployment of a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) ecommerce platform, with the reliability and stability of a dedicated custom environment. What happens on your store never impacts the other store owners and vice versa, there’s no such thing as Miva Merchant “going down” system wide as you often read about happening with some of our better known competitors.
- Support: Normally, we hate calling support just as much as you do. This is precisely why we built our in- house Support Department in the way we’d like to be treated when we call other technology companies. Call it “The Golden Rule Support Plan” and that’s what we live by. Whether it’s helping you understand the very basics of how do you login to your store and setup a product, or if your highly customized store is having a tough to pin down intermittent problem, we don’t run you through silly routines before you can finally talk to someone who knows what they’re doing and we don’t stop until we’ve helped solve your problem.
- Customization: Miva Merchant really stands apart by providing the level of customization normally only offered in enterprise ecommerce platforms without giving up the ease of use and deployment of a SaaS product. Virtually none of our SaaS competitors offer the ability to materially change the underlying structure of your site or your checkout, which is a real bummer when you realize that you can’t optimize their checkout process for maximum conversions or build a site that, passes W3C validation. With Miva Merchant you don’t have to make a choice between ease of use and ability to customize, we do both easily.
- Price: Price is always a tricky one, as most people simply compare their monthly fee or the cost to download the software and don’t look at their TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) or try to figure out other hidden costs. For example if your site goes down every time their platform has a hiccup, how much are you losing per month in lost orders? Or if you download a free Open Source cart and get it up and running, how many extra hours did it take you on that platform or worse will you need to upgrade to a dedicated server just to keep from seeming like your server is connected via dial up? For our customers most of them realize paying a very slight premium on the monthly fee more than makes up for itself in reliability, performance and support.
If you really want to find out what real live customers think about our platform and how much we help contribute to their success, don’t take our word for it, go visit our Community Forums and talk to the thousands of active members who use it as a life blood of their business: