$50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

[lancermedia]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

I'll add my vote for allowing 2 licenses by default or at least a dev type license. For most of the stores we manage from a development and technical standpoint, we don't process orders.....we are in the admin to make changes to the store or to assist the store owner.

Now, when a store owner calls and has a question about an order and what happened, I need to kick them out, thus stopping their workflow, just so I as a developer can go in and look at the issue they want me to see?

I get it, Miva needs money, and they should be able to get it.....but this seems a little too restrictive for the smaller stores that have owners that aren't technically savvy and need someone like us to help out.

Plus, as a developer, I'd hate to be in the middle of configuring something, only to have my store owner kick me out because he needs to look at an order. It doesn't happen often, but it does and can happen. Now we will get to waste time sending emails to say "are you in the store? make sure you stay out of the admin, I'm making changes? are you out yet?"


-Kevin

[SpeakerRepair.com]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Can I assume this new price increase ($50 per seat) will not affect users sticking with Miva Merchant 5.5?

[Rick Wilson]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Can I assume this new price increase ($50 per seat) will not affect users sticking with Miva Merchant 5.5?

If you stay with 5.5 you'll incur the NCF fee after 90 days.

[nottheusual1]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

What is an "NCF fee."

[SpeakerRepair.com]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

If you stay with 5.5 you'll incur the NCF fee after 90 days.

What is the "NCF fee", and how much is it?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Non-Compliance...Miva requires that you remain on the latest release. Its the only way they can insure PCI compliance. Pretty much every cart that is truly PCI compliant does this.

[nottheusual1]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Baloney. Miva has no liability if I don't keep my software "upgraded" to their latest demanded $$$$$ version. This isn't an incremental release. So what if it's buried in the license, it's still hooey. Will they do the same thing to people with manual upgrades set that don't do it in a "timely" fashion?

It's the only way they can run off what's left of the "community" that doesn't fit next year's business model, and too bad for us, as you've read. Shows what you get for being a loyal customer for longer than the current staff has been employed.

Nothing but tire tracks across our backs. What's next -- fees for products with attribute counts larger than the industry average?

My luggage needs to make reservations. Gotta go ...........

[Pamela Hazelton]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

While many do, there's an issue that's very difficult to overcome. The inability to change from MMUI to CSSUI without needing a total rebuild. That's the issue the bulk of my clients have had. One of them dropped recently more than half their features so they could afford to have the transition done for under $3k.

Most carts that do this don't also have that type of situation - users on the SAME version being stuck because in order to truly take advantage of all the features of the system they need a total overhaul. Thus, there's PCI / PA-DSS and there's technology - and with many third-party scripts and services now needing these carts to run on the latest (e.g. CSSUI) it's becoming problematic.

Non-Compliance...Miva requires that you remain on the latest release. Its the only way they can insure PCI compliance. Pretty much every cart that is truly PCI compliant does this.

[SpeakerRepair.com]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Hmm. It really feels like Miva is trying to strong-arm their customers into upgrading by charging a fee (still don't know how much it is) if they don't. And if they DO upgrade, implementing NEW fees for using the service as they always have. It's not a good feeling as a customer of Miva.

Rick, how much is the non-compliance fee?

[Mark Hood]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Hmm. It really feels like Miva is trying to strong-arm their customers into upgrading by charging a fee (still don't know how much it is) if they don't. And if they DO upgrade, implementing NEW fees for using the service as they always have. It's not a good feeling as a customer of Miva.

Rick, how much is the non-compliance fee?

This seems like a nice explanation
http://spiderweave.us/whmcs/announcements.php?id=20

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Baloney. Miva has no liability if I don't keep my software "upgraded" to their latest demanded $$$$$ version. .

Not arguing with your sentiments, however, the above statement just isn't true. They do have liability as the non-compliance fees get charged TO Miva directly...not the customer.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Non-Compliance fees vary.

If you're hosted externally, they're $50/mo.

If you're hosted with Miva, they're 50% of your plan price on Shared, or $200/mo flat on Dedicated.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

For the most part, we've (and I've) been letting this thread run with minimal input, so we could hear as opposed to speak.

I do feel it's time to add a little clarity on the "why" we're making this change. If this "why" doesn't resonate with you, then I probably don't have a great answer for you beyond it.

As for why we did it, it's simple. On the whole we just don't charge enough for Miva Merchant as it stands today.

That's not the whole picture though. For our bottom 25% of our clients, we arguable charge too much. People doing sub $10k in sales annually, paying us $600+ per year is a tough bill to swallow. The next 55% are charged what I would call billed appropriately. They do $10k - $500k in annual sales and they pay anywhere from $600 - $3k annually for their Miva site.

The top 20% however (which is where we spend most of our developer focus as well) on the whole underpay and it's progressive. Our biggest clients are doing $60 million plus via Miva and paying about $5 - $15k annually to do it.

The "old" model is not sustainable for a long term growing company.

So we went and studied the market, here's what we found.

They fall into 3 Categories:

1. Entry level SaaS solution, VC financed and losing enormous amounts of money. This includes Shopify, BigCommerce, Square, SquareSpace, Wix and others. The combined losses on this side from what we "hear" behind the scenes are well north of $100 million annually. I've lived through those cycles (Joe Austin's Miva was somewhat like this) and eventually "the hens come home to roost" as they say. When it hits the fan, they're not going to be looking out for their customer, they'll be looking out for their VC's.

Personally I don't believe the mass market SaaS model is sustainable long term. They generally earn about $1k over the life of the client and they're spending more than $1k to "buy" the client and that doesn't include any money to operate their business. It's self evident why we've chosen not to raise money and follow them.

2. Percentage of Sales Model. So both Shopify and BigCommerce do this too, but so does Yahoo Stores and even high end places like Demandward and other Enterprise Platforms. We talked to a lot of people about this and we hated everything about it. It felt like a success tax in the worst way.

3. Radically Raise our base price. The "Magento Enterprise" model if you will. They now charge $18,000 annually just for the license, and usually it takes at least that to host that beast on top of it. We did consider this model, but the problem with this model is while we probably have 1,000 clients who'd pay this, we'd have to abandon the other 19,000. There's really no "good way" to "split the baby" on this and get 1,000 people to pay it and let the other 19,000 not pay it. From our perspective, if we had chosen this path, this would've been the death blow to the majority of our customers.

So that's how most people charge for ecommerce platforms. But there is another way that's well proven. And that's the "Salesforce" model. Per administrative seat billing. It's used successfully by SalesForce, Sugar, InfusionSoft, QuickBooks, every Accounting System on the planet and many many more.

This model is the most equitable (from our perspective) and while there will certainly be edge cases that we haven't considered, it's hard to imagine this turning out to be punitive or destructive to our core clients.

People hate their price going up, I empathize with that.

The alternatives are simply not clear to them. We're not a lifestyle business like ShopSite or PinnacleCart, we're not simply milking our IP until it someday dies like Mercantec did. We're not taking VC money and eventually having to screw over our customers, free money doesn't last forever. Finally, we don't want to cut off the low end, so we can justify charging our largest customers 20k a year for a license.

[2CDev]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Totally agree. We have these concerns as well.

[netblazon]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Rick, the problem that bothers me with the Magento comparison is that they offer a free version, while Miva does not. That bottom 25%, but probably even a lot of the middle 55% - would be on Magento Community, I'd bet.

I have mixed feelings about all this, and I'm hoping our collective worries end up being no more of a big deal than everyone's concerns about the introduction of the compiler way back when, but I'm definitely worried about losing customer base. So I'm following rather than bitching...concerned but not yet freaked out. (Pardon my French.)