$50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

[slabar]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Live and Dev sites have the same, but separate seat licenses, so you can be in both at the same time.

Thanks I must have missed that somehow while reading the thread.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

No sir I'm not. I have my own dedicated server.

If you don't mind, email me off forum and we can discuss your personal situation, plus I owe you a reply from your PM yesterday.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Out of curiosity, did you consider just raising the monthly price by $10 across the board? That provides benefits to everyone across the board.

I'm not comfortable getting into the level of minutia about if $10/mo or $20/mo across the board would've "worked", because that as an option is not on the table.

I will repeat this part though from above, which is:

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.

It's also worth noting what our goals are in this change.

Our goals are not simply to raise revenue in the short and medium term, although those are goals.

The "bigger" goal if you will is this, we don't believe ANY ecommerce platform focused on SMB's has a functioning business model. Not one of them (including us in our old model), assuming your goal is to be a long term thriving business. There are some edge cases around smallish niche lifestyle businesses, but the Mass Market guys (and Miva) certainly are not that.

The problem is this, let's say you're a Mass Market SaaS Company (I'll call those MMSC for short) and you're pricing model is a range from $40 on the low end with a percentage of sales up to $200 all inclusive.

If you're running that company, what are your economic incentives? They're to get people up to $200 and then do no more for them. Your hopeful that you can do that at a faster clip than they'll churn. For most MMSC's, the lifetime of a client is in the neighborhood of 20 months.

Currently they're spending about 24 months worth of revenue to buy a client that lasts 20 months.

It reminds me of the old sketch from SNL about "The 1st National Bank of Change" how they "make it up in volume". The reason the MMSC's can get away with that today is they have collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars in Other People's Money. I don't have a crystal ball, but I'm certain that all markets are cyclical and the ability to do that (especially in our space) doesn't last forever.

Even if it somehow lasts far longer than I'm anticipating, their economic incentive is to spend the max on marketing and do as little as possible to keep you at the $200 range for more than 24 months.

The Open Source business model certainly gains lots of users, but at one point OS Commerce has something approaching 400 or 500k sites worldwide, that wasn't enough to turn the corner into an actual business.

Magento is only alive today (even with their high priced Enterprise product) from the generosity of eBay, it has not made a penny to date and there's a real chance it never will (in fact, I'll make a friendly wager with anyone, that I'll buy the beer if Magento ever turns a profit before eBay shuts it down, which don't kid yourself, will happen someday since it's not core to eBay's future).

So when looking through that lens, we asked ourselves how can you build a business model that does these things:

1. Supports both the "low end" and the "high end" of our market simultaneously without excluding either one.

2. Provides us a long term scalable model that incentivizes us to focus on helping you grow your business. With this new model, I'm rewarded for adding new features that encourage new seats.

So for example, perhaps you're also paying for another third party software today and you have to run your business in multiple systems. This new model encourages us to look for those overlaps and build a system for you that both simplifies your life, your business and reduces your dependency on other products that are costing you money.

3. A model that is self sustaining revenue wise and provides the resources to not be dependent on a third party for money (like the MMSC's or Magento), that allows us to increase the pace of our feature releases.

[William Davis]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

For a store with 3 simultaneous humans and an API user then yes your price will go up $150/mo on this model.

That is in addition to the $150.00+ monthly we are currently paying?

[Rick Wilson]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

That is in addition to the $150.00+ monthly we are currently paying?

The only thing I know about your current bill is that you're on 4.x, so you're paying an NCF fee. That will go away on 9, so your bill would be $250/mo.

[William Davis]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

My current $150.00. is without the NCF fee.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Then yes, in your case unless you changed your behavior to need less seats, your bill will go to $300.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Bruce, Some are doing front office CS stuff (refunding, editing), and some are just viewing order details (98% of our orders are customized, and so technicians need to see order instructions when setting up orders).

How would you view orders from the front end?

You could view orders, but yea, if you need to modify orders (add/remove/change charges) will will need to go through the admin.

[Pamela Hazelton]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

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.

I'll be honest - as I am with any user. The base of $49 / month is not too much for what's provided. It's quite norm, actually. Yes, $600/year is hard to swallow for businesses generating $10k or less, but let's be realistic. If you're consistently doing $10k annually, you're not taking any real steps to grow your business. The amount spent isn't typically due to the $49/month as it is for all the other charges they incur from add'l seats, NCF, and third-party services they're convinced they need. 9/10 micro businesses are sold on products they don't need in order to grow (don't get me started, it's amazing how many third-party accounts I tell new clients to cancel for the time being).

My only reason for asking that is because a small increase for everyone is much easier to swallow. Even the smallest of companies may need more than one person in the admin at a time in order to provide the best and quickest service possible so they CAN grow. If they're using the admin for everything, including order processing (because they can't afford third-party order processing), that's where it's going to get difficult.

Anyway, my two cents.

[lea-ann]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Is it possible yes and we're considering it.

We'll end up "doing something" about Synchro, but I do need to analyze real data to make any decisions on it.

Since I still have not been able to sync with synchro due to my inventory structure and procedures in QB and I won't be making changes until after holiday shopping, I hope my lack of useability doesn't count in this data. I'd like to see synchro not have to utilize a "seat" for its limited time it would connect.

[QUOTE] from Pamela Hazelton: Even the smallest of companies may need more than one person in the admin at a time in order to provide the best and quickest service possible so they CAN grow. If they're using the admin for everything, including order processing (because they can't afford third-party order processing), that's where it's going to get difficult. </QUOTE}

This is where we find ourselves at this time. Our internet profile has changed dramatically over the last several years and we are having to reinvent ourself and try and make MIVA work for that new profile. In the process, our monthly cost of hosting needs to be reduced until we can grow to fit the bill -- ugh!

[BkraM]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

If we only have one seat will it not allow a new session or will it kick out the active session? If I am in Miva admin and someone starts a Stoneedge Order import will the import fail or will it kick me out. Same the other way if a Stone Edge Order Import is occurring and I login will it boot SE or not allow me to connect?

If I set SE as a different user and get a seat that I plan on using for just SE for all my sites will there be any way to assign that seat to only allow a connection via that user? This way I wouldnt have to constantly have to make sure 2 people arent in the admin when importing orders or processing tracking. Basically a way to assign a seat to a Miva user.

On another note for us if you just go off looking at our active admin session stats you would think we were really active in the admin but we dont use it to manage orders so it is more people just making quick product changes/adding new products or looking at how many unbatched orders there are then probably not logging right out. So it really isnt worth it for us to have more than 2 seats per site (one for human one for SE). But at first this is going to be a major annoyance constantly checking if anyone is in or not just so you can login and check/change something that takes 2 minutes.

[dachenbach]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Even the smallest of companies may need more than one person in the admin at a time in order to provide the best and quickest service possible so they CAN grow. If they're using the admin for everything, including order processing (because they can't afford third-party order processing), that's where it's going to get difficult.

To illustrate Pamela's last paragraph, our business is near the lower end of the "middle class" tier that Rick described, who are currently "billed appropriately", as Rick's put it. From the first day we launched our little site a few years ago we have had one person processing orders, we're running ShipWorks, and we have one person (me) as the sole developer on the site. I would have guessed this was a fairly basic setup. According to the new licensing model as I understand it (I've read this whole thread and the FAQ), that will count as three Administrator seats if we ever want to be logged in concurrently.

Doing the "Are you logged in right now?" dance each time one of us needs to make a small change is very disruptive to each person's workflow. For $100/month, we'll have to do the dance until our business is significantly larger and can justify the expense to re-gain the ability to do what we're doing today.

This having been said, maybe it is possible to convert our order processor's account to a non-admin account. It's not clear to me what the limitations are of a non-admin account, so it may be very helpful to Miva customers for Miva to highlight where we can find such information. After much searching I found a high-level overview in the "Groups" section of the Reference Guide, but since Bruce suggested that if we need to modify orders (which we often do) this will required an admin account, this "downgrade" possibility may not be an option for us.

Rick, thanks for being so active on this forum. I've benefited greatly from it over the years and it goes a long way toward helping understand what's going on. This is a great community. I do appreciate your candidness and willing to listen to feedback. I get that larger stores may be under-paying for this great e-commerce solution. I just fear that the plan as proposed will pick up a lot of smaller customers like us that I don't think Miva was targeting based on your comments in this thread. Thanks for listening.

[William Davis]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Then yes, in your case unless you changed your behavior to need less seats, your bill will go to $300.

100% increase, wow!

[Rick Wilson]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

Since I still have not been able to sync with synchro due to my inventory structure and procedures in QB and I won't be making changes until after holiday shopping, I hope my lack of useability doesn't count in this data. I'd like to see synchro not have to utilize a "seat" for its limited time it would connect.

I want to clear up something. You won't be getting a bill from us with an arbitrary number on it.

Control of the seats is always in your hand, so you certainly won't ever get billed unless you actually buy another one.

[josiahjg]

Re: $50 per additional simultaneous Administrative User

You could view orders, but yea, if you need to modify orders (add/remove/change charges) will will need to go through the admin.

Makes sense... forgive me if this is an easy question, but how do you view orders from front end? I don't see this anywhere... this would save us 5 seats if we could do it...