Miva vs Bigcommerce
Learn the True Cost of Running a Store on Bigcommerce
VS. 
Gross merchant sales processed
by Miva Merchant software:
$100 billion
Gross merchant sales processed by
Bigcommerce software:
$4 billion
Questionable Architecture & Development Philosophy
“Bigcommerce is mediocre at best. Nothing of value has been added in the last few years which is going to limit your competitiveness in the ever changing world of internet shopping.” - Bigcommerce Customer
Software Architecture
Miva's ecommerce platform has been carefully architected, with critical functionality built-in. Bigcommerce has chosen to outsource key functionality to 3rd party providers. This is a partial list of key functionality not available natively on Bigcommerce:
- Bigcommerce's software doesn't have the ability to calculate shipping rules unique to your business, limiting your ability to set advanced product specific shipping rules, weight-based shipping restrictions, and more.
- On Bigcommerce you can't combine multiple products into a kit or bundle, limiting your marketing and inventory tracking options.
- Bigcommerce doesn't allow you to have smart page templates – severely limiting your ability to customize your store.
- Limited backend access* makes everyday processes such as live data transfer and image uploading nearly impossible on Bigcommerce.
*Bigcommerce does not offer standard FTP, database, or server access.
Miva Starter Plan
Includes Miva's entire suite of built-in functionality.
Actual Cost of Comparable Bigcommerce Plan
per month
Now consider the following example of ecommerce functionality built-into Miva's core platform:
Complex Shipping Rules
Bigcommerce's platform has no native ability to manage complex shipping rules. Rather than choosing to build this critical functionality themselves, Bigcommerce has opted to offer it via a 3rd party provider, ShipperHQ (and it's not free – unless you sign up for their enterprise plan). Imagine what happens when this business critical functionality stops working. Who is to blame? Shipper HQ? Bigcommerce? And while they point fingers, your business is crippled.
Vulnerable Hosting Architecture
Miva controls the full hosting stack, managing and backing up every aspect of your ecommerce store.
Contrast this to Bigcommerce's philosophy of outsourcing functionality and infrastructure to 3rd party providers.
“Bigcommerce's templating system was very poorly thought out.” – Former Bigcommerce Customer
“[There's] no logic in the [Bigcommerce] templates. This one hurts the most, and it's the one that probably won't change because of the massive amount of work it would take.” – Andrew Bleakley, Bigcommerce Developer
“Mr. Bleakley is a developer who specializes in ecommerce with over 1,000 websites under his belt...” – ecommercefuel.com
Limited Flexibility, Scalability, and Access
No Template Language, No Logic, and No Conditional Statements
A core strength of Miva's platform lies in our template language; Miva's templates have logic built-into them. This allows Miva's customers to conditionally display elements on their pages, and add functionality.
Bigcommerce does not have a template language, therefore: no logic, no conditional statements, and no custom variables.
Imagine you want to add a promotional banner to a specific category for a sale you are running. With Miva's powerful template language you can create custom conditional statements in the Page Templates that say: If Category Code is equal to "12-string-guitars" display this image.
Because Bigcommerce does not have any logic in their templates, this is not possible using their template language. Instead, you would be forced to create custom JavaScript (and hire an expensive developer) to modify the page source after the page is loaded. Doing things this way also is not good for the search engines, because they only see what was loaded on the page, not the part that was modified with JavaScript.
In the following example, we display a custom "free shipping" banner based on the category:
It is impossible to accurately calculate a cost comparison between Miva and Bigcommerce because Bigcommerce is incapable of the basic features Miva supports.
Locked Down Templates
Miva gives customers the ability to modify templates in whatever manner they like. Bigcommerce limits the editing of templates; many areas are "locked down".
This example Miva site has a custom label finder, as well as custom attribute layout.
It would be impossible to re-create this in Bigcommerce.
No Server Access
Bigcommerce Customers have no access to their server control panel. They have no database access.
FTP is disabled, forcing you to use a file transfer process called WebDAV.
You can see how Bigcommerce thinks about this philosophically given the following quote:
"As a SaaS platform, there are certain things we simply cannot provide. Root-level file access to PHP files is one of those things."
– Jessica Malnik, Bigcommerce
As a SaaS platform ourselves, Miva provides our customers full server control panel access — including the ability to run PHP files.