What do you like best about Miva?
Miva offers a highly scalable platform with the ability to customize your store however you wish.
Our website www.loveisarose.com has been using Miva since 2001 and we have no plans on switching. Our niche products require lots of options and personalization and Miva has been the perfect platform to provide the right solutions for our website.
Their customer support is great and super responsive. I've never had an issue they could not resolve promptly.
The Miva Community Forums are also a great resource for any questions you may have or info you may need. There are tons of users and developers that are always willing to help and share their knowledge.
Now for the Miva Goodies.
Customization / Developer Features:
-MivaScript
The proprietary MivaScript is a very powerful tool for rendering dynamic content.
Can be used at the global, template, and even customer level allowing you to create a very personalized shopping experience.
Assign global or local variables to be used globally or at the local page template level.
-Theme Components
One of my favorite features. Includes, Images, Banners, Content Sections, Product Listings and Navigation Sets.
This is so great because it allows to you have pieces of content or code that can be edited in one place and applied to as many pages on your site as you want.
Create as many navigation elements, product listings, content sections, etc. as you want and dynamically or permanently render them in the page templates you want.
A great feature for rendering supplemental navigation on small screens such as related categories.
-Template Branches
A highly effective way to make changes to your store without affecting current visitors.
Create a branch by copying your existing store (copies all templates, css and js resources)
Edit the new copy of your store until your heart is content and even start working on a redesign.
Preview your changes easily before going live. Great for troubleshooting.
Push the changes live and easily revert back all within the admin.
-CSS/JavaScript Resources
Easily manage CSS and JS files directly in the admin.
Assign all CSS or JS files to a resource group (one for CSS one for JS) and set the order in which they are rendered. Allowing for all CSS or JS files to be output as one file in the client's browsers.
-Page Templates
Create as many custom page templates as you want.
Create Alternate copies of product and category templates and assign them to certain products or categories.
-Global Settings / Elements.
Edit your store's global Head, Header, Footer, MiniBasket, Breadcrumbs and more all in one place.
Store Owner Admin Features:
-Product Attributes (Options a customer can select such as color)
A very powerful tool to help when a product may have several variants such as size or color.
Have a lot of products that use the same attributes? Create an attribute template that can be assigned to as many products as you wish.
The Attribute machine template allows for great customization as well. Maybe you have a product that can be personalized with up to 30 characters and one that can only fit 10 characters. You can dynamically show a different text field based o the product code or sku.
-Product Copy
Have a bunch of new products you're adding to your site?
Are they similar to an existing product?
Copy the existing product with a simple click of a button and make the necessary changes after it is copied.
-Product Filters
Also known as facets, these are an online shopping standard.
Assign / exclude certain filters to certain categories or products.
Year, Make, and model (combination facets) are available.
-Built in SEO Features
Easy to use uri management for creating SEO friendly page URLs.
Easy to use sitemap generator.
Easily edit all Meta tags, Title Tags for every single page on your site.
Built in product Schema.
-Built-in Google Analytics Eccomerce Tracking
-Great Inventory Management
-Highly customizable Shipping Methods.
Flat Rate, Weight Table Based, Price Table Based and more.
Assign different methods to different countries, states and even zip codes.
Limits shipping methods at the product level.
-Easy Integrations with Shipping/ Order Proccessing Platforms such as ShipWorks or ShipStation.
-Review Baskets
View customer shopping carts in real-time.
This is helpful when a customer calls who is having trouble checking out.
Help finish the order with a simple click of the Create Order button.
You can also Shop as a Customer if you'd like to see where the confusion might be on the specific page they are having trouble with. This is useful for identifying checkout hurdles.
-Order Processing is very easy and straightforward with many payment gateways available.
-Authorization Failures
A list of all authorization failures allows you to follow up with any customers having trouble placing an order.
Also great for identifying fraudulent carding attacks.
-Price Groups / Availability Groups
Great features for creating separate pricing or only showing products for customers.
Allows for wholesale pricing.
-Marketplaces / Template Based Data Feeds
Easily Manage products on shopping platforms such as Etsy, Amazon, Ebay and Google Shopping
Have a more custom set up? Create template-based data feeds for Google Shopping/ Merchant Center and any other platform that uses a data feed for product information.
There is much much more but I think I have hit all the important features we use on a regular basis. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.