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    #16
    Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

    Rick, it doesn't seem odd at all to me that I would think Miva uncaring. Miva was once attractive to Mom & Pop stores like mine, but apparently now I'm collateral damage in your drive to increase profitability from larger enterprises. We started with Hostasaurus many years ago, an excellent customer-service oriented company that came highly recommended. In 2010 were paying $115 a month for our site. 5 years later under the reigns of Miva we're paying $295 a month server just to allow us the bandwidth we need. That's a 300% increase to us in 5 years, and now you want another 17% increase just so we can do what we did last month. That doesn't seem very caring or that you have an understanding of your customers.

    On top of that, you showed me that you didn't care when you attempted to charge my company of 2 people the Miva 9 pricing for 6 seats without sending any kind of trial bill, and without giving us the tools to control the number of seats we were being charged for - we weren't even on Miva 9 yet! You also showed me that you didn't care when you sent a single email about PCI compliance giving us a February 27 billing date and then charging us $200 February 20th, a week in advance of the warning. You can unapologetically say that the billing issues don't show anything, but to me they indicate a culture that is oblivious to their customer's needs or concerns; I spent a large amount of time and stress getting those bills corrected.

    And now you show me that you don't care when you ask for an additional $50 a month just to be able to process ours orders while maintaining and enhancing our site. The pricing is miserly. Look at it this way: we sell on Amazon, and I can log in and load my catalog while my clerk uses the same login to process orders. I can do the same on eBay, including using a desktop application to maintain items and sales. Discogs.com is the same. Yet my very own site that I pay the most for allows only a single user to use the back office interface at any one time, regardless of how trivial their access needs might be. Mostly it's the gall of changing the rules mid-game and making my life more difficult, and it seems calculated and uncaring.

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      #17
      Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

      Originally posted by joseibarra View Post
      Under Domain Settings, I "turned down" the Administrator Session Timeout to 30 minutes (don't know what the default is) and the may have helped us avoid some administrator login "collisions" but we still ending up purchasing a seconds seat.
      I believe it is supposed to be 15 minutes for PCI compliance reasons.
      Mark Hood
      Vermont Gear

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        #18
        Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

        Mark is correct, anything higher than 15 mins means you're out of compliance with PCI.
        Thanks,

        Rick Wilson
        CEO
        Miva, Inc.
        [email protected]
        https://www.miva.com

        Comment


          #19
          Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

          Zampino,

          Based on your posts, I'm not sure there's anything I can do or say, other than roll back our business model changes to make you happy (and there's no chance that's happening).

          I would like though to correct a number of factual mistakes you made in your post in case anyone is reading this in the future.

          First, when we bought Hostasaurus we did not do a general price increase. There were a number of customers who were being billed incorrectly for a large variety of historical reasons, but we didn't buy Hosta and raise their prices at all. Since I don't know your site specifically based on your username here, I can only guess. But it sounds like you were on an old Hosta shared plan 3 and had to go to a half-dedicated server (that's the difference between the $111 and $295 price points). As a rule the ONLY reason someone is forced to do that is they were running an older site that either was poorly coded, had bad modules or too much traffic and were crashing the server they were on. So my guess is you fit in one of those three buckets and were told either upgrade or move.

          Second, we did not "just bill you" for seats and we did exactly what you asked us to do above. We sent a bill with a detailed explanation that said: "This is an estimate based on what your store reports back to our licensing system. When you upgrade to 9 you're in control of this, but until then if our estimate is wrong just tell us and we'll take your word for it." Also the invoices were sent more than 2 weeks prior to you actually being billed, providing you ample time to read it and reply if we were wrong. So we actually did exactly what you asked of us above.

          Finally and this isn't a factual error on your part but a logical one. If your definition of whether we care about our clients or not is based on a percentage increase in cost over time, then you're right we're absolutely not ever going to be on the same page about this subject.

          You signed up for Hosta and Miva back in 2003 according to your posts. At the time it was not uncommon for people to be running large 5 figure, 6 figure and even 7 figure online stores on Miva and spending only about $600 a year in total.

          That was unsustainable and the Miva of 2003 was a sea of Red Ink (as I've posted many many times before) and while Hosta was profitable that was all based on Miva having a broken business model. In addition Hosta was profitable because David and Jen worked herculean hours instead of hiring the amount of staff that should've gone with the size business they had.

          So the choice you're either not acknowledging or worse just don't care about, is that what you bought in 2003 if we stuck to that would've forced both Miva and Hosta into bankruptcy in the long run (Miva in 2003 was sold in a fire sale for example).

          Also let's say Miva had been selling hosting and stores for $100 a year back then and to make it a sustainable business the average price would've had to go to $1500 a year. Let's also say the average store owner in that scenario was doing $500k in online sales.

          Should that theoretical $500k store owner be happy or pissed about the theoretical 1,500% price increase?

          The choices would be to try and keep an unsustainable price point and then wake up one day and have your business gone because your hosting provider went out of business, or to pay a reasonable amount for the services provided and just be happy you got a good deal for a while.

          Lastly a good rule of thumb for what we do (ecommerce platform, order processing, reporting, batching, etc...) is that you should be paying between .5% and 1% of your sales through that channel toward your platform. So if you're doing $500k in sales, you should be spending between $2,500 and $5,000 a year for what I described. If you're paying a lot less, don't be surprised when you wake up when day and that deal is no longer available for a variety of reasons. If on the other hand you're paying a lot more than that, then something else is wrong with your setup. Either you're business isn't properly using the platform, you're using it for other non direct sales reasons, or your workflows are poorly optimized. And to be clear in this case, I don't just mean Miva, I mean any ecommerce platform.

          As for me caring about my customers, that's the only thing you've suggested that I take umbrage with. I pour my heart and soul into this company and our customers and I believe for the majority of our customers that shows through. I spend time on the forums (not just explaining stuff like this, but deeply helping people's businesses), I talk to scores of clients per month about a huge variety of issues to help their business (and in theory that's not "my job") and my only ask of our clients is to allow me to adjust our business into a long term sustainable, profitable and growing business.
          Last edited by Rick Wilson; 02-21-15, 08:19 AM.
          Thanks,

          Rick Wilson
          CEO
          Miva, Inc.
          [email protected]
          https://www.miva.com

          Comment


            #20
            Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

            Zampino,

            I will add this offer to the mix. If you're in the scenario where your bill for using Miva is significantly more than 1% of your sales through Miva, please feel free to reach out to me via email.

            I can't just lower your bill, but we might be able to figure out why you're requiring so much resource compared to what you're selling.
            Thanks,

            Rick Wilson
            CEO
            Miva, Inc.
            [email protected]
            https://www.miva.com

            Comment


              #21
              Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

              Rick, as I said, we're Mom & Pop, we moved to the 1/2 server for bandwidth as the only viable solution to the overage charges. We don't make anywhere near $500,000, so clearly we're not a candidate for your pricing, though we've been pushed into it. It seems like a simple concession to allow a couple of seats for a half server, but again, we don't fit your customer model. The $300 6 seat bill you sent didn't say let us know if you're wrong, it said that we're billing you on this date. And you didn't address this week's crazy PCI compliance bill already charged a week ahead of schedule.

              I'm sorry if I've offended your sense of caring, but insulting our business model isn't necessary in this discussion. You've given me all I need to know, apologies to those who don't understand the frustrations of running a small business like ours. I'm done with this discussion.
              Last edited by zampino; 02-21-15, 02:09 PM.

              Comment


                #22
                Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

                Originally posted by Rick Wilson View Post
                The basic premise is incredibly simple (...) ANYONE who SIMULTANEOUSLY accesses the Administrative interface (the back end) needs a seat.
                Well, yes, when you word it like that it IS incredibly simple! ;-) I would have loved to have seen it stated that plainly earlier on but I understand now.

                Originally posted by JFancett View Post
                ...the price went up folks. It's still a pretty good deal in the whole scheme of things.
                I don't disagree that the cost of one additional back-end seat ($50/month) makes our entire shopping cart solution still a pretty good deal in the whole scheme of things. (Though it did strike me as disproportional that I can host my site, get the shopping cart software AND 1 back-end account for the cost of one additional seat.) Of course, the deal gets less "pretty good" with each seat you have to add, but that's not really a point of contention for me since we're not considering many more seats.

                I'll post an excerpt from what I communicated to Miva via email privately, which is more to my point:

                ...this is not so much a matter of the money. I understand Miva has to pay developers. I understand Miva 9 is a huge upgrade and that there are more premium features coming this year, which I'm excited about. It's a valuable product. Price increases happen. We do it too. The reason I am upset is because I don't think Miva is doing what they say they set out to do. I think we're a mom and pop shop. Maybe we're in the top 20% of your customers and don't know it, but I think of our operation as quite small. I feel like we're the guys you're trying to make sure the new pricing model protects, but clearly we're very affected by this. Perhaps this is everyone's point of view- "the policy shouldn't apply to us".

                Originally posted by JFancett View Post
                If you need multiple logins because your operation is robust, you can probably afford the seat license. If you're doing $300k+ in sales a year, you're seriously going to say you can only pay $600/year for your web store and the order processing tools the software offers?
                In your specific examples you may be right. The problem is, that's not the only scenario in the real world. Guys like me are trying to convey that we have pretty small shops but on Day 1 needed (and I use that loosely) 3 seats: our main order processing person, a ShipWorks connection, and myself as a remote, VERY part-time developer for my family's store. We're figuring out how to make it work by changing some of our behaviors but it's certainly not as smooth as it used to be.

                In the spirit of completeness I want to also restate another excerpt from my email to Miva that will help convey a more rounded perspective:

                To be clear, I love the product. I've upgraded our dev site and the admin is beautiful. Miva Merchant fantastic and improving every year. We have no desire to "jump ship". I LOVE Rick's involvement on the forums. I cannot overstate how much I appreciate his desire to communicate with his customers what he's trying to do. I just think you need to also know the effect it is actually having on some customers, or at least this little customer in Kansas. :-)

                I know Miva considered lots of options and feels strongly about their decision. I guess I just want to feel heard.

                Comment


                  #23
                  Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

                  For what it's worth we're listening.

                  I can also tell you based on the number of upgrades to 9 and the number of seats purchased it's somewhere around 15% of our clients buying extra seats.

                  It's plausible the correlation between large store and those who are buying seats is off, but in general I haven't seen that (to be fair, I haven't studied it that closely yet either).

                  Though it did strike me as disproportional that I can host my site, get the shopping cart software AND 1 back-end account for the cost of one additional seat.
                  I actually agree and frankly think that's more a sign of our "base price" being a bit too low. If I was building Miva from scratch today, knowing who are customers are, I'd either have a base price of $100/month for the first seat/package (with a bit more disk included) or I'd have tiered pricing based on sales volume so that if you do less than $100k a year it's X and if you do more, it's Y.

                  I'm literally just thinking out loud here, so please don't read this to be anything more than brainstorming.

                  The underlying issue we're still unravelling is exactly what you present, how do keep it affordable for the sub $100k a year store, reasonable for the $100k - $500k a year store and appropriately priced for the $500k plus per year store. And achieve all 3 without either huge holes in your business model, or cutting off the low end to protect the high end.
                  Thanks,

                  Rick Wilson
                  CEO
                  Miva, Inc.
                  [email protected]
                  https://www.miva.com

                  Comment


                    #24
                    Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

                    Dachenbach sums up a lot of my feelings, though I know that I overstated my case through frustration. I want to thank Rick for discussing this issue via email with me, I reverse my comments about his commitment and care. The mix of content that we require is an unusual one for Miva's hosting plans, but Rick has been helping us to find a good solution to our resource needs that will let us maintain our investment in Miva and keep our costs controlled. Miva 9 has some interesting new options and I can tell that the developers have put a lot of time and care into its functionality. I look forward to the platform's growth, growing pains aside.

                    Comment


                      #25
                      Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

                      To add a little bit of color for Zampino's use case (this is for posterity if anyone is reading it later), he hosts and distributes MP3's via our hosting, which the way we architect our disk array isn't designed to do. We pay roughly $10k per TB to ensure we have ultra high performance and reliability, but when it comes to large file storage we end up at odds with some use cases like this one.

                      We do plan to someday offer multiple types of storage at different price points, but that's a bit off time wise.
                      Thanks,

                      Rick Wilson
                      CEO
                      Miva, Inc.
                      [email protected]
                      https://www.miva.com

                      Comment


                        #26
                        Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

                        Originally posted by Rick Wilson View Post
                        For what it's worth we're listening.
                        Thanks for your thoughts Rick. I sincerely appreciate it.

                        Originally posted by Rick Wilson View Post
                        I actually agree and frankly think that's more a sign of our "base price" being a bit too low. If I was building Miva from scratch today, knowing who are customers are, I'd either have a base price of $100/month for the first seat/package (with a bit more disk included) or I'd have tiered pricing based on sales volume so that if you do less than $100k a year it's X and if you do more, it's Y.

                        I'm literally just thinking out loud here, so please don't read this to be anything more than brainstorming.
                        Ha, I've actually thought about those exact two scenarios as well, both seeming like attractive approaches but fully understanding hindsight is 20/20.

                        Comment


                          #27
                          Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

                          FYI: For those who have large storage issues, and pretty easy solution is to move your content to a CDN. Amazon web services, for example, you get 5 GB of standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, 2,000 Put Requests, and 15GB of data transfer out each month for one year for free.
                          Bruce Golub
                          Phosphor Media - "Your Success is our Business"

                          Improve Your Customer Service | Get MORE Customers | Edit CSS/Javascript/HTML Easily | Make Your Site Faster | Get Indexed by Google | Free Modules | Follow Us on Facebook
                          phosphormedia.com

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                            #28
                            Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

                            We rarely have multiple users on the back end, but I got surprised with a $100 seat fee. I would like to be able to turn off the option to allow multiple users to log in simultaneously, so the second user will simply have to wait their turn. How can I do this? Because I don't intend to pay this any more.

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                              #29
                              Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

                              Originally posted by elisabeth_hale View Post
                              We rarely have multiple users on the back end, but I got surprised with a $100 seat fee. I would like to be able to turn off the option to allow multiple users to log in simultaneously, so the second user will simply have to wait their turn. How can I do this? Because I don't intend to pay this any more.
                              Have you updated to MM9 - it will give you this type of control.

                              Leslie
                              Leslie Kirk
                              Miva Certified Developer
                              Miva Merchant Specialist since 1997
                              Previously of Webs Your Way
                              (aka Leslie Nord leslienord)

                              Email me: [email protected]
                              www.lesliekirk.com

                              Follow me: Twitter | Facebook | FourSquare | Pinterest | Flickr

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                                #30
                                Re: Administrator versus Regular Users

                                Still working on it. For us, this was a terrible time of year for this to be implemented. Thank you very much Leslie.

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