I've been using Miva Merchant for my E-commerce website for 7 years. It was fine at first, but I find more and more problems with it, and the costs have doubled in the last few years. Sales have also declined in the last year, a first since I started. I'm looking for a hosted site, with SSL certificate, ability to interface to Paypal Pro Payments. I currently have 2000 items, and would like the ability to double that. While I am somewhat proficient with web stuff, I'd much prefer something simple that I can do myself. An import in from the Miva site would be great, but I understand that might not be an easy feat. Other things I'd really like to have: Ability to sell my e-books, and deliver them. Signup for my mailed flyers, email list, etc. Ability to easily send out discount codes, sales, etc. Shipping modules that work easily. I've had tons of problems of late with Miva not being configured right for USPS small flat rate boxes. I'm *not* interested in spending many days or weeks learning something new. I don't mind paying a reasonable amount for a hosted website. Would prefer something US based, with excellent uptime. Good customer service. I still have a number of months before my yearly paid Miva service is up. I'd like to research and work on the new cart before bringing it online. I don't have huge sales, but it accounts for 40% of all my sales at this point, and don't want to mess it up. I invested about $600 in Miva modules and some custom work, other than the monthly fees. I don't mind spending a bit, but don't want to be hit left and right for a bunch of extra costs.
Hosted, I guess I would look at big commerce.... hosted yourself with something like Magento is going to be cheaper in the long run and you don't have any requirements that don't come out of the box with Magento either. For what you would ultimately have to do here the learning curve is marginal really. I usually migrate data myself but you can use various services such as http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com/supported-carts to do it as well. So, importing your shop is not an issue. hope that helps, Nigel
Hi HLS, I can understand your situation with Miva Merchant as I designed and maintained dozens of Miva Merchant websites for 10 years. I also got tired of the legacy problems, dealing with modules and updating to newer versions was not easy. After a lot of research I chose Bigcommerce as my platform of choice for my clients. It has powerful features built-in, excellent SEO and design capabilities and the admin interface and content editor are very easy to use. My opinion is a hosted shopping cart is the way to go. You do not have to worry about installation, upgrades and the difficulty of having to deal with a third-party web host that may not directly support your ecommerce software. The only drawback is that hosted carts usually charge based on the number of products, so with the large number you are dealing with you would need the platinum plan but that is for unlimited products and they also have a migration service where they can import your products and customers and even setup the category and product redirects. You can't beat that! If you are looking for a designer with experience in Miva Merchant and Bigcommerce, I'd be happy to help. I'll send you an email with my contact information.
While I completely respect Matt's and the other poster's view point, I'd have to say that they are not universal. First all, Miva Merchant can not be considered as a traditional 'non-hosted (SAAS) provider as almost all of the non-hosted service issues do not hold true for Miva Merchant. For example, with Miva Merchant The software is installed and setup for you if you use either their in house hosting providers or several reputable outside hosts. Security compliance is assured. Uptime is as close to 99.9% as any major hosted solution Updates are streamlined, simple and easy for any store owner to do with their streaming update process. Initial Costs are actually LOWER than many other hosted solutions. Support is consistently superior in our experience to that of hosted solutions. Second, many of the 'legacy' issues are...well history. While its true that they don't currently have a built in discounting or coupon or softgoods feature, those two feature are fairly inexpensive to implement. Third, SEO IS built into current merchant versions. Forth, while costs of a hosted solution may seem low at first, they keep rising as you become more profitable, where as with the right management, your infrastructure costs should go DOWN as you become more profitable. Lastly, if you see an opportunity to increase profits by doing X, you are out of luck hosted environments if they don't support it...and when they do...then your competitors ALSO have that functionality. Meaning, there is no way to be first at the game.