New Pricing

[Conard]

Re: New Pricing

A 50% increase in pricing for any of your merchants would be a call for EOL as you put it. If all of the merchants here had to raise their pricing by that much they would all be gone in less than a year. Is this the end of the Miva I met back in 1999 when I came on board???
Now if I were a developer and saw this notice I would be contacting several of the other carts out there to set up deals to migrate merchants away from Miva and to a new, lower cost system. That's were the money is to be made in the next year or so.

[AaronM]

Re: New Pricing

Rick??? I have been with Miva since roughly Y2K and have been extremely happy up until this day. My monthly bill for one website is going from roughly $90 a month to $1,500 A MONTH?? The other from $49ish to $249?? Are you on drugs??? Count me out. You know... I sort of had my concerns once Miva started doing their own hosting. I thought to myself 'what is going to keep them from doing something really STUPID'. Well... it appears nothing is going to keep them from doing something really stupid.... cause they just did it. This is a very random business decision guys and I hope it works out for you but I'm not sticking around to watch. I'm going host shopping today. Taking my 3 Miva sites and going somewhere else. Been using 3D cart for a couple other stores and have been very happy with them.

I don't need 10 seats. I only have 5 employees... and I'm the only one that ever logs into Miva! I don't need 1,000GB of bandwidth... I only use 40GB in the busiest season! I don't need 20GB stortage... I only use 1GB!!!


Edit: Sure I sell just over the $1,000,000 threshold for the Enterprise plan but what difference does that make to YOU, Rick? Are you in the TAX business now? I do not use ANY more resources than I paid for and I consumed virtually zero tech support. This is the mentality of the day. Take from the 'rich' just because they have more to give. Well... I don't. Do you know how much profit was made off of those $1,000,000 sales. No, you don't but it was not nearly enough to justify $1,500/month hosting fees!

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: New Pricing

I think it would be helpful for those that will now be reconsidering carts if Miva would explain how they plan to re-invest the new revenue it will receive.

I'd like to see a massive jump in number of available themes. Also, a slick integrated point-of-sale system. Both of these options are available in the market today. I've also never updated the site for template changes since we switched to CSSUI in 2010. It would be nice if those were able to happen automatically. I'm sure it would be costly for us to have them implemented now.

BTW, David is a great asset. He alone might keep shop owners from switching carts, given his reputation to be highly competent.

From what I can see, many "average (per Miva)" Miva shop owners will see there costs rise from $50 to $750 per month. 15x increase.

I'm also a bit concerned that given this dramatic increase, what else might be coming in the future when it comes to costs from Miva.

Miva is highly customizable. Its order processing is fairly slick. It does have quite a bit going for itself. Miva programmers seem to be quite competent.

Bottom line, what can we expect in the future when it comes to specific improvements?

I actually wrote what comes at the end first, but I tend to ramble and it got long, so I wanted to answer some of your specific questions first and then jump back to some details on the logic behind the changes. I also thank you for your comment on me; I sincerely appreciate that. I don't get to interact with our customers as much these days, other than at the conference, and I miss that since I've been around for 16 years now, but my duties have me mostly lurking behind the scenes.

Regarding re-investment, on the IT side, the nice thing about our hosting architecture is that many aspects of it can be upgraded in place without down time, and customers receive those benefits as they occur. To give you a real world example, we operate with centralized storage, where most of our servers don't actually have hard drives in them like a traditional computer, they treat a slice of storage on one of our networked arrays as their 'hard drive'. The benefit to us is it means far fewer parts to fail, with more redundancy, and more performance. Beginning last fall, we began, and ultimately completed, replacing our storage arrays, or their drives, with flash-based disk arrays; i.e. memory-chip based storage, not spinning platters. This increased the disk performance for nearly all customers by about 10x from a random I/O standpoint, 400% increase in read rate, 700% increase in write rate. Improving the I/O performance in turn improves website performance, especially for stores loaded with modules that perform a lot of random work with each request. This is just one example of many ongoing projects we undertake that aren't immediately obvious but pay great dividends from the customer website perspective. I've currently got projects going related to security, server hardware, network hardware, so on and so forth, all with the purpose of protecting customer sites and increasing performance, and most of which will 'just appear' without scheduled outage.

Re-investment in other aspects of the company that I have involvement in is also occurring. We have several new support hires, and also a new person overseeing support, amongst other duties, and that has resulted in a significant reduction in hold times over the past three weeks (today not withstanding of course), but with still a long way to go as he's only been on the job for two months. There are big changes coming on the helpdesk side, staff side, training, etc. to hopefully produce regular and significant improvements in your interactions with support. I'm sure Rick can elaborate on other ways we allocate revenues internally that I don't have involvement in.

Your question about CSSUI, template changes and specific improvements is timely as I was just discussing this with Rick and Brennan yesterday, on behalf of a customer who reached out to me directly, and I had to educate myself on that aspect of our software. As you've found, once your store has been deployed, templates do not update as store updates occur. This was not as big a deal in years past because much of the software improvements were admin-facing in the back end and template changes were not very frequent. More recently, many new customer-facing changes have been occurring that have necessitated template changes, and obviously you do not automatically receive these. This was due to us having to make the decision of auto updating templates, which would break any customizations customers had done, or leave them alone, which is what we did since destroying customer changes with every template update was deemed the less desirable option. Currently, every template change is documented at http://www.miva.com/template-changes but you'd need to apply them manually, or hire a developer, or us, to perform them. The end result of the conversation was that a tool to update templates is desperately needed now so that is going to get development time. The initial brain storming idea would be that it would be an admin wizard that could look through your page templates, look for blocks of our code that matches and replace it with the new code, leaving other code of yours that may be interspersed within ours alone. This will of course not always work well, but it will probably be able to identify where non-default code was found and left, so you could at least know which of your templates you need to target after running the wizard.

Rick will need to chime in more on other upcoming features seeing development time, as I have little to no involvement in that side of things, I just thought it interesting that what you're looking for, I was looking for on behalf of someone else just yesterday.


Okay, back to the thread topic. I'll defer most questions that relate to policy to Rick to ensure they are answered with 100% accuracy, but I did have involvement in the changes so certain things I can comment on. A large percentage of our customers are on the minimal or lower tiered plans, and the pricing of those plans dates back to the year 2000 where I set the pricing for a Miva Merchant-enabled plan at either $37.50/mo or $49.50/mo. We didn't raise prices for at least nine years, simply dropping the $37.50 option about five years ago if memory serves. Having no price increase for so long has of course made the changes less palatable, but the old prices were also not sustainable for a modern hosting environment, nor did they allow proper software development on the Miva side after hosting and software merged. The seat charge was designed to rectify that, as well as charge significantly more to large businesses, but it was also a first attempt.

What we've found in the past year is that most customers on those lower plans have also added at least one admin seat so two people can log in at the same time. We implemented the developer seat policy so store owners would not need to pay to let developers work while they work, but the extra seat remained, so we found that even the smallest businesses often had two people logged into the admin at the same time, requiring the extra $50/mo, and we did not intend for that to be the case.

Making an extra seat free would not work; it simply no longer makes sense financially for us to add the second seat while keeping the hosting plans priced at what I set fifteen years ago. The compromise was in the middle at $80/mo so we could raise specs on the plans dramatically and include the extra seat, causing most of our smaller customers to drop back down by $20/mo from what they had been paying after the seat charge implementation, and for most overages to be eliminated, as most customers who do generate overages were doing so in the $10 to $20/mo range, which the new plans cover and then some.

Even with such a change, the largest businesses would still be paying a trivial percentage, while, in many cases, consuming a disproportionate amount of staff time, both from their driving many of the current and upcoming higher end features, and in support. For example, a $20 mil/yr company with ten people logged in simultaneously and a very complex store has requirements for features and support that small stores do not. Those features often take far more time to add, but we do not charge to add features to the wishlist, nor do we charge for support, and customers of that size are far more likely to generate multi-hour support tickets several times per month due to the complexities found in those stores. Those customers will still be paying a small fraction of a percentage of their revenues with the increases, but it will go a lot further on our side in allowing us to service all customers' requests fairly.

I apologize for the long winded reply, we've obviously had a lot of feedback on this already, by phone, email and forum, so I wanted to be detailed, and Rick will follow up. I believe he can also address the topic of profit margins which have been mentioned by a few.

If anyone would like to reach out to me offline to discuss further, I'm here and happy to help as much as possible, or I can talk to those who do have answers if it's not me.

[UpsetClient]

Re: New Pricing

Rick,


I have been a client, first with Hostasaurus and then with Miva for over 10 years. You can try and justify your price increase all that you want but you are speaking to a very long term and soon to be former client.


To change pricing by such unbelievably high rates and now base pricing on revenue which has nothing to do with bandwidth and disc usage is beyond criminal. I don’t need 5 admin users (I don’t have 5 employees) I can’t afford your price changes.


How would you feel Rick, if you bought gas at $3.00 a gallon and then were told it will now cost $45.00 a gallon???? That is the type of price increase you are implementing with next to no warning.


In addition, I do have a website on Magento, and it is the community version and it actually is more compatible with many other companies and easily as powerful as Miva for what is now a small fraction of the cost.


To give people 30 days notice of this increase is beyond criminal. To punish companies who are small operations but actually generate sales is also criminal. Charge on bandwidth and disc space. Not on revenue.


I just spent a considerable amount of money creating a new site in Miva with custom programming and joined the design club thinking it is a place where it could grow at an affordable price. It does not use a lot of bandwidth nor disc space and now I see this was a massive mistake.


Good luck with your un-ethical new practices, you are soon to lose my business and many others very soon. You just made the best decision ever for your competition because they will be getting our business and many other former Miva clients in the near future.

[UpsetClient]

Re: New Pricing

Punishing those who generate revenue and don't use much bandwidth or generate tickets or use too much disc space is price gouging and not ethical. Saying your new rates are a small fraction of sales by making assumptions on profit margins is also not acceptable. 500k a year is a small business, it is not a large company and your price increase can prevent hiring an employee and increasing growth.

A company doing less than 10k a year is a hobby, not a business and I don't know why MIVA even began focussing on those types of clients while now punishing long term, small yet successful companies. To raise the price per month by such massive percentages is a crime. You can justify it all you want but this not right.

How would you feel if your costs went up by this amount with no warning? And please, don't insult us by saying 30 days is ample notice.

I now feel bad that I have so strongly recommended MIVA to others in the past and plan on moving in the very near future.

[ProCycle]

Re: New Pricing

...Do you know how much profit was made off of those $1,000,000 sales. No, you don't but it was not nearly enough to justify $1,500/month hosting fees!

In my business, $1 million in sales nets about $40,000 in profit after all the expenses are paid. Miva apparently believes they deserve to get half of that?

[Rick Wilson]

Re: New Pricing

My last 12 months of Miva sales were $93K (and under $100K for 3 of the last 4 years per the internal Miva stats)

Keitho,

There should be no rounding, email me off Forum and we'll check into it. You should be in the Starter plan.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: New Pricing

Are returns, order adjustments and cancellations taken into account for the turnover? What about what currency the store uses? We use Australian $, does your system convert?

Yes sales is net of returns and cancels.

Currency is meant to be converted to $US (but we probably need to think more about how to handle that).

[Rick Wilson]

Re: New Pricing

I think it would be helpful for those that will now be reconsidering carts if Miva would explain how they plan to re-invest the new revenue it will receive.

I'd like to see a massive jump in number of available themes. Also, a slick integrated point-of-sale system. Both of these options are available in the market today. I've also never updated the site for template changes since we switched to CSSUI in 2010. It would be nice if those were able to happen automatically. I'm sure it would be costly for us to have them implemented now.

BTW, David is a great asset. He alone might keep shop owners from switching carts, given his reputation to be highly competent.

From what I can see, many "average (per Miva)" Miva shop owners will see there costs rise from $50 to $750 per month. 15x increase.

I'm also a bit concerned that given this dramatic increase, what else might be coming in the future when it comes to costs from Miva.

Miva is highly customizable. Its order processing is fairly slick. It does have quite a bit going for itself. Miva programmers seem to be quite competent.

Bottom line, what can we expect in the future when it comes to specific improvements?

Gomblue,

This is a good question and I can say at some level I avoided addressing much of this during the announcement because I felt that was like selling "vaporware".

However at a high level:

1. Live back up data centers for people on Professional and Enterprise
2. Mobile POS
3. SoftGoods (coming in 9.5)
4. Multi-Domain Support (so there's no incremental cost for a new store, your bill is based on total GMV).
5. A very long list of features that I'm not comfortable publishing here for competitive reasons but am happy to discuss via email.

It's also worth noting the Average Miva customer pays far more than $49.95. If I had to put the "average" price increase in to the public domain it's about a 60% price increase, not a 500% increase.

David covered a lot of this but there's simply no "easy" way to rip off the band aid when it comes to adjusting pricing/business models.

Our plan has always been to be a large viable SaaS company and frankly the old pricing model made it impossible to get there. So this price change is designed to be reinvested in our company (as have all previous changes).

One this is easy to forget that 8 years ago we only had 5 employees and hadn't released new features in 4 years. Today we have 100 employees and make 4 major releases per year. If you look from that perspective it gives a lot of insight into what we have planned.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: New Pricing

Lea-ann,

Email me off forum, I can help.

[UpsetClient]

Re: New Pricing - Not Accurate Regarding Shopify Pricing

Rick,

Why not be honest. Shopify Unlimited is $179.00 per month with an additional $40.00 for their merchant account. Your plan is $1,495.00

I have a feeling you are counting the merchant processing fees. This is the big difference. Shopify comes with a merchant account and merchant processing. So if the number is higher it is as a result of the CC merchant fees. Miva does not include this. With Miva we need our own merchant account and pay credit card fees to that account.

With your new plan, we would pay up to $1,4950 per month solely for the hosting/software alone.

Shopify $179 or $219.00 WITH a merchant account - MIVA $1,495

This is their best plan. They offer a plans for much less.

Your numbers do not add up.

[papi34]

Re: New Pricing

I am very upset with this new plan. Not only is a 170% price hike lunacy, but using Annual Merchant Revenue as a benchmark is absurd. As many have already pointed out, you have no idea what our margins are; a business with $1,000,000+ in revenue could very easily have less net profit than a business with $100k in revenue.

Back in 2008, I switched from a horrible hosting service (Earthlink) to Hostasuarus because Earthlink’s plans were based on sales volume and number of products, not to mention their service sucked. I was so happy with Hostasuarus, but started to get nervous when Miva bought them out to get in the hosting business. It’s sad to see Miva has forgotten its roots and abandoned the little guy to join the likes of their competitors (Shopify, BigCommerce and Magento).

Creating tiered plans based on Disk Space, Bandwidth and number of Admin Seats if fine. Keep sales volume and number of products out of the equation. We should be paying for resources used, not taxed on perceived earnings!

[Rick Wilson]

Re: New Pricing

Papi34,

I certainly understand why you feel that way.

However if you look at how our competitors do it, they severely limit the product to "force you up" to higher plans.

So for example Shopify doesn't even support something as basic as real time shipping rates until you're on their $179.95 a month plan.

We don't like that plan at all, we prefer to give all features to all customers.

Also one other thing not mentioned here is this pricing change opens us up for adding true Multi-Domain support into the core software (coming very soon), so people won't be charged on a per store basis.

We can't let all features out and have unlimited domains without another qualifier, so we feel this is the next best option.

[UpsetClient]

Re: New Pricing

You are assuming people want multiple domains. What if they don't?????

Try and justify all you want. You have made a ridiculous increase with next to no warning and have eliminated all trust that existed between myself and MIVA. If you've done this, who knows what you will do in the future.

Again - charging based on dollar volume is not fair, not ethical and not moral. Base it on use. Don't penalize others for what someone else is doing.

You don't realize - you are forcing people to move because they can not afford your service.

Your price increase equals the following for a self employed small business owner.

stay with miva - or make a car payment
stay with miva - or pay your health insurance
stay with miva - or pay your car insurance, liability insurance, phone bills and more
stay with miva - or take a well deserved vacation at some point in the year
stay with miva - or hire a part time worker
stay with miva - or invest capital back into your business

This is the reality thanks to your decisions.

[gomblue]

Re: New Pricing

To be fair, Shopify offers services a la carte if you ask. To say it's $180 is wrong. Not the right forum to go into details.