Mivapay pricing question

[koala]

Not sure if this is appropriate to ask and I won't post the actual price just in case it varies... but, in a nutshell, why is Mivapay so expensive?

I'm not trying to sound negative and forgive my ignorance... I had assumed that Mivapay would probably price out similar to a payment gateway or merchant account / POS terminal rental. I was really surprised by the amount I was quoted.

Has anyone else here on the forums explored this option? I'd love to understand why we'd want to pay as much for this as we do for our annual Miva hosting plan.

[Rick Wilson]

I can answer that very simply.

The driving feature for MivaPay is to enable Subscriptions. Out of the box Subscription Management like we've built simply doesn't exist in the market fully integrated into ecom systems like we've done and is a premium product.

We don't expect most of our customers to sign up for MivaPay, we'll be very pleased if 5% of them do over the next 3 years. Thus in order to justify both it's cost to build, it's PCI requirements as well as the alternatives in the market for Subscription Management we feel it's fairly priced.

Much like SearchSpring is often more expensive than core Miva itself, because only a subset of customers will ever need to buy it.

The price can vary depending on how you're using it, so you should talk to Sales about it.

[koala]

Thanks Rick, I do think the way it's implemented is pretty cool. For us, we're trying to determine if we can recoup the investment on subscriptions. I'd like to think we can pull it off, but it's such a small subset of our product mix, so similar issue really to how Mivapay it's self is targeted.

If we were doing more business in the American market it'd totally be justified, but Canada is just such a small market in comparison that I don't know if the cost aligns with the potential sales results here, at least in our industry.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

I'll add a few other major differences from MivaPay to most traditional gateways, as they apply to the Miva Merchant software.

There are a few payment options in Miva Merchant where the credit card number does not pass through your store whatsoever, even in memory for a fraction of a second; MivaPay is one of those as well, but there's a couple others. The payment, without the shopper having any knowledge of this, goes directly from their computer to MivaPay and on to your gateway. This can eliminate both cost and administrative burden of PCI and credit card data security from many store owners/operators. Depending on the size of the company and volume of transactions (in dollar amount), this may even make MivaPay pay for itself rapidly or even instantly, as the larger you get, the heavier the PCI burden becomes, and you can shift that to us.

Next, the difference that MivaPay offers compared to using one of the gateways that allows you to not touch the credit card number, is the fact that since we are storing the card numbers, you can now switch gateways and/or merchant account providers at will without affecting your customers' stored cards (wallet) and/or subscriptions, if you're using that feature. So let's say you're on MivaPay, customers are storing payment info, customers enable subscriptions, your business is growing. You had been using payment gateway X and merchant account Y. Your volume is at the point where you shop around and find provider Z will offer you a much lower rate. Well, simple switch behind the scenes and now the cards and subscription charges are going through your new provider. If you had not been using MivaPay, well you wouldn't have either feature to begin with from the Miva Merchant side, but if you had been storing cards in your payment gateway provider's server and doing subscriptions or repeat charges on the gateway side, and you wanted to switch gateways, you'd lose all those stored cards and have to reach out to every customer telling the hey we're changing payment systems, I'll need your card again. That is not convenient, is time consuming, and, as we all know, some people will leave subscriptions going even if they don't really want them anymore, and this is an opportunity for them to say forget about it where otherwise they'd have put it off, possibly indefinitely.

[Rick Wilson]

Dylan,

That's why you should make sure you talk to our Sales team, we're being flexible, especially right now as we learn the market.

[alphabet]

How does a user select MivaPay among other payment options during the checkout flow? On the OSEL page will there be Visa MC AMEX PayPal MivaPay options?

Does MivaPay work with all gateways especially Braintree and Authorize.net?

Is there a video tutorial?

[ILoveHostasaurus]

MivaPay is not a gateway itself, so you'd still use your own choice of payment gateway, but MivaPay would communicate with it on your behalf. During checkout, the box where the credit card information is submitted by your shopper is presented by a MivaPay web server, so your checkout looks the same as it does now, but the data flow for the credit card information is from shopper's computer to MivaPay server instead of your site, while the rest of the info goes to your site/server like normal.

I'll have to defer to Rick on which gateways are supported but I believe the intent was to support the same ones Miva Merchant can use natively. I do not know if 100% of them were implemented at launch.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

I got confirmation that all the normal Miva Merchant payment gateways also work in MivaPay. Obviously that doesn't include gateways that don't touch credit cards, or are 100% hosted off-site, such as PayPal checkouts using a PayPal account, or PayFlow Link where the shopper leaves your site and comes back.

[Rick Wilson]

We support these native gateways in MivaPay:

Authorize.net
Braintree
Chase Paymentech Orbital
First Data Global Gateway
Cybersource
Intuit Merchant Services
PayFlow Pro in API Mode
PayPal Payments Pro

Here's a video that shows how it looks in a site: http://www.miva.com/videos/store_own...ntree-payments

You're also using it if you're on apps.miva.com or www.miva.com or www.barebonesbroth.com in the real world

[joshpappas]

We actually experienced the same confusion about the pricing. In fact, we initially thought the sales guy was quoting an annual rate, which was already double what we had been told to expect based on preliminary discussions, only to later realize it was a monthly rate, which completely derailed the whole conversation. This was disappointing, because I had been convinced for months that MivaPay was going to be a great solution for us.

I also felt bad for the sales guy, to be honest. The only justification he could offer for the pricing was that MivaPay supports subscriptions, which we wouldn't use. We then offered to pay a much, much lower rate just to use the payment tokenization and wallet side of the service, thinking some money was better than no money, but that was not accepted.

If MivaPay had been offered with just the payment and wallet features at a price that was more in line with the market rate for those services, we would have used it. The subscription service could still be an add-on that costs extra, because that's obviously a huge value-add for businesses that need subscriptions. That approach would broaden the market for MivaPay substantially. Instead of being relevant to under 5% of the customer base, it would be relevant to basically 100% of the customer base.

My fear, though, is that the underlying costs to create and maintain MivaPay made it impossible to offer lower pricing. I hope I'm wrong and that it can become more affordable moving forward.

Anyways, that's my two cents. We've already gone in another direction for our payment solution, but I wish you guys all the best with MivaPay.

[koala]

Josh, I'm sorry to hear of your frustrations as well. I well and truly thought this should be in the $30-50 / month range (including subscription support).

I think this is going to be a classic "wait and see" type of situation. If Miva is happy with the uptake and business, I say well done. If not, hopefully they'll correct and more of us will be able to jump on board.

[Rick Wilson]

I can say for sure that we decided to price it as a premium product with room to lower the price if needed, versus going through rounds of price increases like we did with the core Miva product until we found what we feel is the right pricing.

[Rick Wilson]

With that said though, we don't see this as $30-$50 a month product at all, and I don't ever see us pricing it there. This isn't a gateway, it just has some gateway features. For those that don't use Subscriptions (which is the primary driver of value), we're still trying to figure out how to price it (and what to do if they start using subscriptions after saying they won't).

[koala]

That's fair, I just appreciate your willingness to listen and debate. A lot of companies wouldn't even give us the time of day on something like this :)

[joshpappas]

This isn't a gateway, it just has some gateway features.

I definitely understand where you're coming from here. However, we're already paying for a gateway, and our gateway already offers tokenization, wallets, and hosted payment forms. We just need a Miva payment module that integrates those features into our stores. As it turns out, it's much cheaper to implement such a module than it is to use MivaPay.

I think that's why it's easy to think of MivaPay as a $30-$50/mo service, assuming those are the only features you need. It basically integrates those same features more seamlessly and easily than you might get otherwise. In that sense, I really think of it as a convenience more than a premium service. We had honestly expected something in that price range as well.

The counterpoint, of course, is what David already mentioned. By using the features offered by our gateway, it becomes disruptive to change gateways. Different businesses will place a different value on that, but it's an acceptable compromise to us at this point.