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    #76
    Re: New Pricing

    Originally posted by Rick Wilson View Post
    Now with all of that said, this change is different than anything we've done in the past and I encourage anyone who wants to email me offline to discuss their specific situation to please do so.

    We are learning and making exceptions.
    Please do reach out to Rick. I think that the more data he has from store owners the better the over all picture which in turn can make this a better experience for everyone. I have shared a number of my thoughts with him and am encouraging store owners to do the same.
    Last edited by lesliekirk; 10-04-15, 09:13 AM.
    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

    Comment


      #77
      Re: New Pricing

      Originally posted by aubreyd View Post

      I messaged you on Friday with our URLs but haven't gotten a response as of yet. I'm sure your team has been very busy and will get back with me sometime soon.
      You can email Rick directly at [email protected] - do reach out to him.
      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

      Comment


        #78
        Re: New Pricing

        I'm still trying to understand why annual sales is a good metric for the use of Miva's resources. I could possibly understand it if they didn't have access to our detailed usage, BUT THEY DO.

        If a site makes one $1,000,000.00 sale a year on an otherwise dormant site, how could this possible equate to selling 1,000,000 $0.99 products throughout the year on a very busy site?

        One of the reasons MIVA seemed so good to me is that they didn't try to get a cut of the sales, as some other carts do. Now they've effectively changed to a cart that takes a cut. As someone who hits just over $100,000 a year, Miva's fee is 3% of sales. I now need to compare Miva to other carts using the 3% fee for comparison.
        Last edited by Darin; 10-04-15, 12:36 PM.

        Comment


          #79
          Re: New Pricing

          Originally posted by Rick Wilson View Post
          Also as Larry and Gomblue posted about, this is also part of a long term play to continue adding a broader scope of functionality to the platform, the idea (as I've discussed before and at all the MivaCon's) is for Miva to be the center of your ecommerce business life, not one of many platforms (all with different costs), so this is also a good time to share where your other cost/pain points are as it helps us prioritize what we're adding/building.
          As I told Rick privately, I support him in that it's ultimately up to Miva to do what they feel is best for their business and I'm not going to come down on them for making decisions like this even if I wouldn't do the same in their shoes. I feel as if Miva, like a lot of platforms in the space, was underpriced. However, I believe they need to be careful not to ignore the market and solely price based upon what they feel the product should be worth to a company.

          Unfortunately for smaller merchants, Miva has grown past them. It's not right or wrong. It's just data. There are many platforms out there that will continue to offer a manageable solution for $50/month. And frankly, anyone looking to pay that probably don't have the need for the configuration power that Miva offers. Any company that is utilizing one of the new Ready Themes can easily get rolling on Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion and the like. All that said, I believe this new pricing is an overreach. It assumes that their software is good enough to replace other pieces and their relative assigned budgets. I don't believe they are there yet and don't ever anticipate them to be the dominating part of a company's "ecommerce business life" even at these new price points. The problem is that by the time they invest in developing an accounting package, an analytical package, a CRM, an email marketing solution, a warehouse management system, an inventory management system, etc, they will need to move past even these new prices. Platforms like Websphere and Hybris are massively expensive systems and still don't do everything. If Miva has their eye on that space, that's fine. But they need to understand most of their customers will not follow them.

          As far as being the center of a company's ecommerce business life, many of us "large small businesses" or "small medium size businesses" cannot use Miva in it's standard form for a lot of the things we do. We use Monsoon Stone Edge for order management and inventory management. Monsoon Stone Edge doesn't even do everything we need so we supplement it with a warehouse management system from Barcoders and an analytics reporting system called Communique. We then use Quickbooks for accounting. Mailchimp costs us real money because we have a large contact list. We use Spring Metrics for customized offers and SearchSpring for a search that actually can add value to the shopping experience. Thank God Google Analytics is free. The problem is that even though a company like ours could probably afford $1500/month if Miva replaced all of those services and packages, by the time it does all that they will most likely make the case they need to charge $5000/month.

          Personally, I would break up the Miva offering into modules and charge for them individually. In my business, it's impossible to sell a $400 spa cover by only offering a $400 spa cover. You have to allow customers to make the value judgment on an add-on and decide if they really need it. In my research of other platforms (I won't name names here), I found a cool recurring purchase add-on for a platform. It was $99/month or almost a 100% add-on cost to their highest non-enterprise plan. And I'd definitely consider it because we could really use that functionality for chemicals and filters. I see the Miva platform as being able to be split into the following segments:

          - Shopping Cart (catalog, cart, checkout, account management, order history)
          - Order Processing and Shipment Label Printing
          - Accounting System Export Integration
          - Marketplace Integration (eBay, Amazon, etc)
          - Advanced Marketing (coupons, gift certs, upsales)
          - API Access
          - Multi-Storefront / Same Backend
          - Support Levels
          - Server and Bandwidth Usage and Storage
          - Advanced Features sold on an individual basis
          > Social Login
          > Single Sign-On (blogs, forums, Kayako, etc)
          > Points Programs
          > Advanced Shipping Rules
          > Product Feed Generation
          > Abandoned Cart Marketing

          They should give customers the option to plug into their platforms as needed. Attach a price to it that makes you profitable. The issue I have is forcing their clients to buy all the functionality while at the same time charging above market rates. I also have an issue with a company basing their pricing on how well I run my business or more specifically how quickly I grow my top-line revenue. No business is the same. It is quite conceivable for a $500k/year business to gross $400k while a totally different $2M/year business may only gross $100k. Top-line revenue is not an indicator of profitability and hence ability to pay. At the end of the day, how well we do shouldn't affect Miva's budget. I don't believe they should set their budget based on the sales of their client's businesses. They should evaluate the market and charge a price they need to cover their expenses, make a profit and stay competitive with their peers.

          As I told Rick, I love Miva and have always enjoyed the relationship. I feel like I've had a front-row seat like many people in this forum to see the current management bring this platform back from the brink of extinction. But I think they are miscalculating here. There aren't many $1M/year businesses that will pay $18000 a year when they are evaluating packages that cost 1/10th of that. I know I'll draw the ire of some on this board when I say this, but I don't see a problem with Miva moving past the $50/month segment because it's overserved and doesn't really offer the revenue needed to grow the platform. Though I feel it's high for the low end of the revenue scale, I really don't even have an issue with $250/month for a business using Miva for most functions of daily ecommerce life. But an all or nothing offering that starts at $750/month (IMHO most businesses that really need to budget for other systems to compliment Miva's offering most likely have $500k+/year in sales) just isn't market competitive right now. If other platforms either raise their price or go out of business, maybe we can start to think about that conversation. I just think as a business that puts a lot of thought into how our business runs that I'd rather be nickel and dimed as long as I can choose which nickels and which dimes.

          Though we definitely can afford more than we pay than the $140ish we pay now, we're staring at a 10x increase in cost. It is difficult to actually say it, but without a significant modification or change of direction we will be forced to start looking to see what else is out there.
          Jason Fancett
          America's SPA-MART - "Where Spa Owners Shop SMART!"
          Check us out for all of your hot tub needs including spa covers, spa filters, spa chemicals and more.
          Miva Merchant forum users can use coupon code MIVAFORUM to receive $5 off your first order of $30 or more.

          Comment


            #80
            Re: New Pricing

            Originally posted by JFancett View Post
            I know I'll draw the ire of some on this board when I say this, but I don't see a problem with Miva moving past the $50/month segment because it's overserved and doesn't really offer the revenue needed to grow the platform. Though I feel it's high for the low end of the revenue scale, I really don't even have an issue with $250/month for a business using Miva for most functions of daily ecommerce life. But an all or nothing offering that starts at $750/month (IMHO most businesses that really need to budget for other systems to compliment Miva's offering most likely have $500k+/year in sales) just isn't market competitive right now. If other platforms either raise their price or go out of business, maybe we can start to think about that conversation. I just think as a business that puts a lot of thought into how our business runs that I'd rather be nickel and dimed as long as I can choose which nickels and which dimes.
            I do agree that the increase to $79.95 isn't all that bad on it's own. Increasing the disk space, bandwidth and adding a seat license will actually offset that price. I do think the next price point of $249.95 is a bit too much of a jump. Perhaps $149.95 would have been easier to stomach. Enough people have already eloquently spoken on how $1M in gross sales is not the same as taking home $1M. I would suggest these same people chime in on where their think these types of gross sales break points should (if at all) come.

            It does pain me that one of my key selling points of Miva has been to brag on how Miva doesn't take a cut of the sale. To me, this new pricing scheme does appear to do just that. I liked that Miva was different in that respect, a store owner could have as many products or make as much money as the wanted to using Miva.

            My hope is that there is still a way for my lower budget store owners to continue using Miva Merchant. Just before Christmas is not a good time to find out they may have to throw in the towel.
            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

            Comment


              #81
              Re: New Pricing

              Originally posted by lesliekirk View Post
              Enough people have already eloquently spoken on how $1M in gross sales is not the same as taking home $1M. I would suggest these same people chime in on where their think these types of gross sales break points should (if at all) come.
              If it wasn't apparent in my post above, I don't agree that top-line revenues is an appropriate pricing qualifier. Charge what you think you need to charge. But don't tie your pricing to how well or not well I run my business. It should be reflective of your budget, not mine. It should be reflective of how much I ask you to do for me (support tickets, storage, features used, bandwidth, server CPU usage), not what I may or may not be able to afford based on my sales.

              I also disagree with the assertion that bandwidth usage is not an indicator of resource demand. Companies with more traffic will typically have more sales and budgets leading them to demand more from the platform as they are trying to maximize the growth. The larger companies do drive the new feature creation, but they are also willing to pay for it.

              I think the pricing should be based upon a client-selected mix of functionality and resource demand. IMHO transaction fees and revenue-based pricing are negative marketing messages.
              Jason Fancett
              America's SPA-MART - "Where Spa Owners Shop SMART!"
              Check us out for all of your hot tub needs including spa covers, spa filters, spa chemicals and more.
              Miva Merchant forum users can use coupon code MIVAFORUM to receive $5 off your first order of $30 or more.

              Comment


                #82
                Re: New Pricing

                Originally posted by JFancett View Post
                If it wasn't apparent in my post above, I don't agree that top-line revenues is an appropriate pricing qualifier. Charge what you think you need to charge. But don't tie your pricing to how well or not well I run my business. It should be reflective of your budget, not mine. It should be reflective of how much I ask you to do for me (support tickets, storage, features used, bandwidth, server CPU usage), not what I may or may not be able to afford based on my sales.
                It's like walking into McDonald's and ordering a Big Mac. The cashier says "No problem, sir, but first we need to see your most recent W2". You show them you made $30,000 and the cashier says "Ok, that'll be $3 for your Big Mac". Then the next guy behind you shows that he made $300,000 and the cashier says "Ok, that'll be $30 for your Big Mac". My question to Rick would be, do you think this scenario is fair and just?
                Last edited by SpeakerRepair.com; 10-04-15, 01:47 PM.

                Comment


                  #83
                  Re: New Pricing

                  Originally posted by JFancett View Post
                  It should be reflective of how much I ask you to do for me (support tickets, storage, features used, bandwidth, server CPU usage), not what I may or may not be able to afford based on my sales.

                  I also disagree with the assertion that bandwidth usage is not an indicator of resource demand. Companies with more traffic will typically have more sales and budgets leading them to demand more from the platform as they are trying to maximize the growth. The larger companies do drive the new feature creation, but they are also willing to pay for it.
                  I won't speak to the other points as those are Rick topics, but regarding resource usage, there are simply too many stores operating in too many different ways to use any of those metrics for billing purposes without having all the same concerns presented here over the metrics we did end up going with. Some examples:

                  1) We regularly encounter sites that have tickets opened because they're going over their plan on traffic. Many times, this is the result of someone who is not web-savvy working on the site, and they use images that are suited for print work in their web site and just let the CSS/html squeeze them down to the desired display size. So you end up with stores serving 2 MB images on product pages when a 100kb image would have sufficed. The end result is a site that is incredibly inefficient from a data transmittal perspective, i.e. lots of bandwidth without lots of sales.

                  2) We have sites whose businesses involve heavy browsing and others that involve no browsing. For example, a site selling cell phone batteries is going to have no browsing. You have one phone, you find that battery, you check out. In contrast, we have sites selling curtains, curtain rods, etc. People browse the site for hours looking at all the options since home decor involves a lot of shopping and indecision.

                  3) We have sites that are incredibly inefficient and those that are very efficient. For example, a site loaded down with bad code, bad modules, etc. may take 1 second, 1.5 second, etc. just to render one page. Another may take 0.2 seconds of processing time to render a page. The less efficient one could potentially use five or even ten times more of our processing resources to service the same number of requests, and CPU is one of our more expensive resources.

                  Server memory would be a similar story.

                  4) We have sites that generate a disproportionate amount of disk I/O. I won't name names, but there are three particular third party modules that my research suggests are responsible for as much as 25% of our storage operations (reads and writes).

                  5) There are customers who open a lot of support tickets, others open none, some are quick tickets, some are incredibly complex tickets.


                  If we went down the path where we attach a price to each metric, no one would have any idea what their bill would be from one month to the next, and pricing would change all the time since we'd be forced to treat every resource as a commodity that we buy and re-sell. We purchase storage, server blades, network ports, software, negotiate and renew support contracts, etc. all the time, and the prices fluctuate constantly based on what the industries are doing at the time, how recently the 'next big thing' came out, if our need happens to occur at the end of a quarter or fiscal year for a supplier, if our need coincides with a sales rep needing just a little more to make some quota, etc.

                  All of the above would also penalize customers, potentially severely, for bogus traffic. For example, lets say some hackers runs a script that tries to break into your wordpress blog a few million times per day. That could consume a very heavy amount of cpu resources, then at the end of the month you get a big bill even though your sales were not affected. Sorry, you used the cpu, you got billed for it.
                  David Hubbard
                  CIO
                  Miva
                  [email protected]
                  http://www.miva.com

                  Comment


                    #84
                    Re: New Pricing

                    Hi David,

                    Thanks for the reply. I respectfully disagree. And that says a lot since I respect your contributions to all things Miva and acknowledge you as a major force that makes everything go. Firstly, Amazon AWS does just fine attaching a number to resource usage and you can charge for multiple levels of support that includes varying amounts of free tickets. We experience this with other software packages we use. It may require adding the the concept of CPU time to your billing like Amazon does, but at least it's a measurable commodity that a business case can be made for its cost.

                    The pricing by revenue band is way too arbitrary and makes assumptions at best. We may be one of those clients you speak of consuming many CPU cycles, maybe we're not. If we are, I would support that CPU usage being measured and billed. However, here's what I do know. We use three other servers besides our Miva installation to serve "SPA-MART.com". Our Miva usage is under 800MB of storage and between 22GB and 30GB of transfer a month. We have 2 admin seats. We run this retail division of our company with a staff of 2 full-time and 1 part-time. In addition, we manage in Stone Edge OM. Frankly, I pay for the second admin seat out of convenience. It's not used a lot and is only owned so we don't have to kick out the StoneEdge user. Based on our $2M annual revenue, we are being required to upgrade to a plan that features 10 admin seats, 20GB of storage and 1000GB of transfer for 10x what we pay now. I'm sure there are $2M/year companies that need all that, but we are not one of them. The bigger issue is that billing by annual revenue is much more arbitrary than trying to bill on the metrics that most ecommerce platforms (including your own until next month) have used for years and will use for the foreseeable future.

                    Originally posted by ILoveHostasaurus View Post
                    1) We regularly encounter sites that have tickets opened because they're going over their plan on traffic. Many times, this is the result of someone who is not web-savvy working on the site, and they use images that are suited for print work in their web site and just let the CSS/html squeeze them down to the desired display size. So you end up with stores serving 2 MB images on product pages when a 100kb image would have sufficed. The end result is a site that is incredibly inefficient from a data transmittal perspective, i.e. lots of bandwidth without lots of sales.
                    You already bill for overages. If the overage amount needs to increase, then increase it. As for customer support time, I doubt this ticket is opened more than once if it's properly handled and explained by support staff.

                    Originally posted by ILoveHostasaurus View Post
                    2) We have sites whose businesses involve heavy browsing and others that involve no browsing. For example, a site selling cell phone batteries is going to have no browsing. You have one phone, you find that battery, you check out. In contrast, we have sites selling curtains, curtain rods, etc. People browse the site for hours looking at all the options since home decor involves a lot of shopping and indecision.
                    This is precisely why billing by revenue is the wrong way to go. A $250k/year business can be a resource hog while a $10M/year business that only uses Miva for a fraction of its functionality is never even noticed.

                    Originally posted by ILoveHostasaurus View Post
                    3) We have sites that are incredibly inefficient and those that are very efficient. For example, a site loaded down with bad code, bad modules, etc. may take 1 second, 1.5 second, etc. just to render one page. Another may take 0.2 seconds of processing time to render a page. The less efficient one could potentially use five or even ten times more of our processing resources to service the same number of requests, and CPU is one of our more expensive resources.

                    Server memory would be a similar story.
                    The answer here is to bill CPU usage time like Amazon AWS or to put sites into VPS containers with a finite amount of assigned memory.

                    Originally posted by ILoveHostasaurus View Post
                    4) We have sites that generate a disproportionate amount of disk I/O. I won't name names, but there are three particular third party modules that my research suggests are responsible for as much as 25% of our storage operations (reads and writes).
                    If you can research it, it's measurable and hence billable.

                    Originally posted by ILoveHostasaurus View Post
                    5) There are customers who open a lot of support tickets, others open none, some are quick tickets, some are incredibly complex tickets.
                    The perfect argument for charging for advanced support. If it's a client created issue, it should be billable.


                    Originally posted by ILoveHostasaurus View Post
                    If we went down the path where we attach a price to each metric, no one would have any idea what their bill would be from one month to the next, and pricing would change all the time since we'd be forced to treat every resource as a commodity that we buy and re-sell. We purchase storage, server blades, network ports, software, negotiate and renew support contracts, etc. all the time, and the prices fluctuate constantly based on what the industries are doing at the time, how recently the 'next big thing' came out, if our need happens to occur at the end of a quarter or fiscal year for a supplier, if our need coincides with a sales rep needing just a little more to make some quota, etc.

                    All of the above would also penalize customers, potentially severely, for bogus traffic. For example, lets say some hackers runs a script that tries to break into your wordpress blog a few million times per day. That could consume a very heavy amount of cpu resources, then at the end of the month you get a big bill even though your sales were not affected. Sorry, you used the cpu, you got billed for it.
                    Not sure about anyone else, but I'd prefer to be billed for what we use instead of what you think I can afford.

                    I think the biggest issue is that the market does not support your new billing philosophy. There are comparable platforms that will now be priced at a fraction of yours. If you don't feel they are comparable, I respect that. But the person paying the bill is the ultimate judge of what constitutes value as we decide where our dollars go and I just feel that you're going down a road that a vast majority of your clients will reject. There just isn't a defensible business case for us paying $1500/month for something we can get elsewhere for $150-$500/month. Like I said, I feel that Miva was underpriced like a lot of platforms. The new pricing is just too aggressive IMHO and not defensible as it is using an arbitrary metric as it basis when plenty of quantifiable metrics do exist.

                    We buy about $600k a year in shipping services. If freight carrier A started charging 10x what freight carrier B or C did just because they felt we could afford it based on our sales, we wouldn't be using freight carrier A anymore.
                    Jason Fancett
                    America's SPA-MART - "Where Spa Owners Shop SMART!"
                    Check us out for all of your hot tub needs including spa covers, spa filters, spa chemicals and more.
                    Miva Merchant forum users can use coupon code MIVAFORUM to receive $5 off your first order of $30 or more.

                    Comment


                      #85
                      Re: New Pricing

                      Originally posted by ILoveHostasaurus View Post
                      4) We have sites that generate a disproportionate amount of disk I/O. I won't name names, but there are three particular third party modules that my research suggests are responsible for as much as 25% of our storage operations (reads and writes).
                      Perhaps more effort needs to be put into making store owners aware of which modules might be causing more drag on their store. I wonder how many just don't know that some of these modules are part of the problem? Is there anything available to the store owner to be able to monitor module resource usage? It would be great to have some sort of search in the admin that would enable the store owner to see the health of store.
                      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

                      Comment


                        #86
                        Re: New Pricing

                        I'm not interested in beating a dead horse as othes have arelady done a great job of explaing the problems with the the new Miva Merchant pricing.

                        However, as someone who has been using Miva Merchant for 15 years I feel compelled to comment. I have always believed that I was engaged in a fair and mutually benenficial business relathinship with Miva. I find the new pricing neither fair nor mutually beneficial.

                        Business is business and I try not to get emotional about situations like this but when you have 15 years and thousands of man hours invested in something it is hard not to get emotional. I have lost track of how many small business owners I have helped realize their dream of launching an online store and in every case I recommended Miva Merchant. I can no longer in good conscience recommed Miva Merchant to anyone launching an online store.

                        I vote with my wallet every day, where to shop, where to eat , where to buy office supplies. If one gas stations prices are too high I go down the street to the next gas station. If their price and service is more competitive next week I will go back to them. With Miva Merchant its just not that easy to walk away from or start using a new solution. However, once I walk away from Miva Merchant I will never come back, the cost to migrate is just too great (not to mention the lack of trust)

                        Unless there is a dramatic change to the new pricing, our plan is to finish the year with Miva Merchant and transtion to a new provider in January.

                        Best of luck to those who stick around.

                        Comment


                          #87
                          Re: New Pricing

                          I have been with MIVA since 2000 (version 2.00) and I too plan on finishing the year with out with MIVA and will transition in Jan. now regardless of the pricing. This price change has forced me to spend the weekend looking at different carts/options and there are just better fits for my business. I don't use real-time shipping, or variants, kits, etc.... and frankly I don't even know what API's are - or what they are used for. I think MIVA is a great value at $249 a month for what is offered, but I can not justify paying for features that I don't plan on using. There are simply better options out there for my business. My monthly fee is due to jump from $79 to $249 a month. I only need one seat and use barely over 1TB of storage. Looking around has really been an eye-opener. There are SaaS options which offer apps which I would in fact use and pay for which MIVA doesn't offer. KIT, Traktor, etc. I prefer to pay for features I would use on a monthly basis rather than be charged for features which I do not use.


                          With this new pricing strategy, how does MIVA plan on attracting new business at the low/entry end? Even if some new businesses are convinced they need real-time shipping and are completely motivated by price alone they would also need to think that their business will never routinely breach 100K in sales to make MIVA their choice. And business owners are aspirational.

                          On the high end, some of these new enterprise options (the "-ify" one in Canada and the BIG one based in Austin) may be grossly inferior to MIVA - but just like phone cameras - they will keep getting better and better (they have deep pockets) and will eventually take market share away from MIVA and Magento just as phone cameras have taken market share from 'real' cameras. Even if their enterprise options never approach MIVA levels of functionality they will eventually become capable enough to retain some business from moving elsewhere or at the very least retain successful businesses for longer.

                          I keep being haunted by the second post of this thread. Rick you gave superfluous information (about third party hosts). There was no need to reply with third party hosting not being an escape/answer to the price increase. This is very telling because it shows what was forefront in your mind... generating more income. And the way the post was answered (regardless of perceived rudeness) shows undue stress.

                          I have much invested with MIVA over 15 years, but I've decided at this point, regardless of the pricing, to rip off the band-aid as soon as the holidays are over. I'm convinced that MIVA is being squeezed and is dammed if it doesn't change its pricing strategy and is dammed if it does. The second post of this thread... what was answered and how it was answered convinced me.

                          Comment


                            #88
                            Re: New Pricing

                            Selfhelp1,

                            I apologize if my second post came off draconian, it wasn't meant that way (and I hope all of my subsequent posts have shown that).

                            I am not sure how else to reply to the initial post, it wasn't a post asking for a discussion. Many of the subsequent posts have been a valid and meaningful discussion and I hope you agree we've been deeply engaged in them in an honest way.

                            I also don't want to beat a dead horse, so I'll sum up everything that's transpired since the announcement last week:

                            1. We screwed up on "small merchants". Roughly speaking those doing sub $10 - $15k a year in online sales. We're working on a new plan for them and are making exceptions for them in the meantime.

                            2. Anyone who asks for a pricing review can have one, it might take us a couple days to review their site and get back to them but we're looking at sites individually.

                            3. We're going to be reviewing our tiers to make sure we split them up correctly, if we "missed the mark" we'll adjust.

                            The main takeaway I want people to take from this discussion is really two things:

                            1. Pricing based on Disk, Bandwidth and Seats isn't really feasible in the big picture (we hoped Seats would fix this, but they ultimately did not) since especially Disk and Bandwidth are a minuscule part of our overall cost to provide a robust software platform.

                            We're not asking people to blindly accept these changes nor are we asking them to just "shut up and take it", we are however asking them (if only for a moment) to understand Point 1 and be reasonable in the dialogue (and the vast majority have been).

                            2. Our goal here has always been to price to market and I strongly believe that on average we're far closer to market pricing with our new model than most here realize. Many of our customers have been exclusively in Miva-land for a very long time and do not understand the true cost of ownership unless and until they actually use a competitive platform.

                            Now with that said, I am also 100% certain that there's no way to make an adjustment like this and get it 100% right and price everyone "perfectly", so anyone who asks will get a pricing review. Our only request on this is to allow us a few business days to work through it.

                            In essence we're trying to get a more full view of the market and are taking into account our customers unique businesses and experiences.
                            Thanks,

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

                            Comment


                              #89
                              Re: New Pricing

                              Speakerrepair,

                              My question to Rick would be, do you think this scenario is fair and just?
                              It's actually fairly simple.

                              Two of the most commonly requested/expected things from our client base are essentially 100% uptime (or as close as humanly possible) and stable upgrades/quick bug fixes.

                              If you're a merchant doing $10k a year in sales if we're down for 8 hours or even 5 days like BigCommerce was earlier this year, it's not going to fundamentally put you out of business.

                              However if a $10 million merchant is down for that long, one of the first emails I usually get is essentially "what are you going to do for me since you just cost me $x thousands in sales".

                              While we don't compensate for lost sales (as that would be both impossible and suicidal) we do spend a disproportionate amount of our resources on this type of activity which also directly benefits the much larger merchants on our platform (it's why in my opinion we have the most number of Enterprise merchants in the market according to BuiltWith).

                              Second is a similar line of thinking but for a bug fix or update that doesn't break your store. If you have critical functionality that's either already broken for whatever reason or breaks during an upgrade, a small merchant can live with those, but our large merchants don't want to wait weeks, months or years for a bug fix as it's costing them real revenue via lost sales.

                              Same is true for an upgrade that breaks your store for days and it's the most common horror story we hear about both Magento and open source carts in general.

                              So in both cases you're talking about huge internal expense that is impossible to recoup via Disk, Bandwidth or even Features (I can't realistically charge an uptime premium or for bug fixes).

                              I'm not arguing the top line revenue is a perfect metric, I'm not even arguing that it's fair. I'm simply arguing that it's a reasonable proxy for those two items along with many others like that.

                              If I had a perfect metric for charging customers I would use it, but we're not a commodity like Oil or Pork Bellies, we're a highly advanced software solution based on intellectual property that powers people's business and we're still trying to solve a fundamental problem of how do you offer such a product to people who are both small and large and price it correctly.
                              Thanks,

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

                              Comment


                                #90
                                Re: New Pricing

                                Originally posted by JFancett View Post
                                Hi David,

                                Thanks for the reply. I respectfully disagree. And that says a lot since I respect your contributions to all things Miva and acknowledge you as a major force that makes everything go. Firstly, Amazon AWS does just fine attaching a number to resource usage and you can charge for multiple levels of support that includes varying amounts of free tickets. We experience this with other software packages we use. It may require adding the the concept of CPU time to your billing like Amazon does, but at least it's a measurable commodity that a business case can be made for its cost.

                                The pricing by revenue band is way too arbitrary and makes assumptions at best. We may be one of those clients you speak of consuming many CPU cycles, maybe we're not. If we are, I would support that CPU usage being measured and billed.
                                I agree that it would technically be possible to meter our customers down to the cpu cycle, but the huge difference is that the product Amazon is selling is cpu cycles, memory and bandwidth. You're doing your own thing and they'll tally it up on your invoice. Our product is our software and we want the hosting to ultimately just be an underlying characteristic one doesn't need to think about as it's assumed to be included and possessing appropriate resources for a business of a given size. As we move further in that direction, hosting infrastructure resources will ideally get to the point where customers don't worry about gigabits and gigabytes, they just think about their business and what they'd like to see added to the software to better help their business.

                                One goal as we went through this process internally was to be able to bump the plans up to a level where most overages and the need to purchase additional seats could be eliminated for nearly everyone. This came about because an almost universal complaint has been getting billed unpredictable amounts every month, whether it be traffic overage, disk overage, hired a new employee and had to add a seat, etc. This issue, that customers do seem to very much dislike, is exactly what would continue if we added more metrics to what we bill for rather than eliminated them. Some would consider it fair, some wouldn't, but the common characteristic is that no one would have any idea what their monthly bill may look like.

                                As Rick just posted, there is still a lot of discussion occurring and we are listening to everyone's input and taking those ideas into consideration. I'm in San Diego this week too, albeit with rain today (huh?!?!), so keep posting thoughts, questions, complaints and we'll be talking about it all in depth.
                                David Hubbard
                                CIO
                                Miva
                                [email protected]
                                http://www.miva.com

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