CS-Cart Multi-Vendor vs. Miva

Great for a quick and easy setup of a multi-vendor solution, supporting multiple stores / languages / payment options. Will probably need some tuning if you have 1 million products or so. Great if you have a PHP dev or team, probably not the best option if you don't know the language and need to customise backend logic.

Incentivized

If you are familiar with online retail, you will find it easy to use and love the diverse way of arranging your store and products. If you are brand new to online retail, Miva Merchant has partners that can help you design the perfect present that is easy to maintain.

• Easy to use
• No third party control
• Great support
• Lost of [an] add-on to make it [a] more vast platform
• Can sale [almost] any product

• General versatility, though changes commonly require the aid of a true Miva developer to implement
• Compatible with many payment gateways and a fair assortment of third-party services
• Developers employed directly by Miva to handle merchant projects are personable and responsive to most requests

• update subscription
• 3rd party theme & addons subscriptions (its not sure that you have also updates in 2 years)
• expensive license prices (if everything is cheaper, more peoples will buy it)

Incentivized

• Training and documentation. Miva Merchant is fairly complex, and while they continue to make good progress in providing resources for all levels of expertise (beginner to expert), there are still a number of gaps. To take the step beyond the initial levels of online storefront requires expert assistance for most businesses (unless they have some substantial IT/technical resources available).
• Market for add-on and add-in products. (Note: this is significantly biased by our own business experience selling workflow and feature products for Miva Merchant.) The long-term goal for Miva has been stated to essentially involve having integration partners (selling their time) and larger companion product partners (selling products that work with, but usually NOT within Merchant). There is clearly a gap of potential customer needs that they are attempting to build into the core platform. Of course, no one can cover all needs! While Miva Merchant is not hostile to third-party product companies, neither do they have an explicit place in their long term roadmap. It is my opinion that their strategy of minimizing third-party add-on developers may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and I shudder to imagine a time when all significant features only come from the developers within Miva. As good as they are (quite good) they suffer from the inevitable myopia that ALL companies have - they are NOT their customers!

Miva Merchant works! It is a stable platform, it uses many standards and when it does break, typically due to database corruption, if you know a little about SQL or have a Miva support package, repairs are typically minutes away Vs. hours or days.

The software consists of most of all e-commerce related features. Also, there are plenty of third party addons are available in the market which can improve our business. There are a lot of powerful themes available in the cs cart market which improve the look and feel on the front store. If CS-cart adjusted the price on their software license cost, controlling the third party addon cost and provide more freelancers with cheaper hourly rate for the customization on the cs-cart multi vendor software, the cs-cart company can be a master among other e-commerce software companies in the world.

Miva Merchant allow individual of various skills to create the perfect online store! The wizards inside Miva Merchant that has step by step allow someone with little or no programming skills to a skilled programmer who can customize to his or her heart content.

I work with multiple Miva sites daily, and uptime is fantastic. Outages are rare from my experience, and any issues have generally been short and handled quickly.

I've had very good support over the years. They've helped solve some issues here and there that were difficult to track down. Thumbs up.

Incentivized

An overwhelming majority of the support technicians are top-notch. One or two key exceptions stand out, but even those are typically fine - just occasionally wrong or unhelpful. Overall I seem to get quick and useful support, whether it's for the software or a web hosting-based need.

Mostly extremely easy to implement, both back-end logic as well as styling. Great addon marketplace helped, particularly around payment options.

Incentivized

Creating the Miva store originally took a reasonable amount of time, 2-3 months, but we were unable to migrate our orders and customer accounts from the old platform. Additional refinements were required over the following 6 months to refine the functionality and features so that they worked properly for our store and fulfillment process.

For big vision in doing something in online marketplace, I think CS-Cart can help to scale up and run business smoothly. CS-Cart started their business in 2005 and since [then has been] running successfully worldwide. It means they have a large scale of experience in implementing online marketplace based software and we can rely on them.

Incentivized

BigCommerce, Shopify and Shopware are all superior to Miva. They allow you more power to personalize, power your store, and better B2B options. They have all solved the issues that Miva has with categorizing and subcategorizing products, which Miva doesn't allow that creates issues with duplicating subcategories, duplicate keywords and canibalization. Miva isn't mobile first, mobile friendly, the other sites are.

Miva has proven to be a great solution for smaller mom-and-pop stores through large enterprise-class businesses with tens of thousands of products. Performance is just as strong on enterprise-class stores as on considerably smaller stores, and an increasing number of marketing/sales tools are continually being added to the core Miva functionality to keep up with current marketplace demands.

• From an investment point of view, it is naturally much more profitable to purchase CS-Cart Multi-Vendor than to assemble a team of developers and try to create such a platform from scratch.
• Creating a marketplace is a rather risky business. If you don't know a lot about marketplace building technologies, consider investing in a different business. But if you have already decided on the idea, and all you have to do is find a suitable platform, then CS-Cart Multi-Vendor will probably be a profitable investment. And if your sales go at least half a year after purchasing this platform, then you will quickly enough recoup these several thousand dollars.

• We have lost some business due to lack of easy MIVA connectivity with popular POS systems.
• For the most part, focussing on MIVA as the primary eCommerce platform my company offers has been very positive choice for me and my clients. The choice of MIVA has allowed me to focus on learning a singular platform where I have the ability to modify the look & feel as well as the function of the store. For my clients, MIVA presents an easy to use administrative interface (Magento, by comparison, is a nightmare) with plenty of functionality.