Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

[mjstonez]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

I'm so angry at this I don't even know where to start. I'm a small business owner and I've been with Miva since 1999 and now I feel completely betrayed, after spending nearly $60,000 over the past 16 years on licensing and hosting I think this is an abuse of the people who have supported you the whole time. I've spent nearly $10,000 updating to 9 and a whole new site with responsive design over the past 12 months. Not to mention the $500/mo we have to spend for faceted search from a 3rd party for something that should be built into miva (being a world class product and all) (that cant even sort in the admin by a custom product field, we had to pay to have a module built that has that function). Miva has dropped from nearly 11,000 sites to 8000 sites - looks like they will continue to drop after this. We will stick around for a while but I have already met with 2 other cart providers and have a third meeting today. To say I am disappointment by this is an understatement. Good job at abandoning your most devoted client base.

Mike Stone,
Small Business Owner

[lesliekirk]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

Mike, have you reached out to Rick directly?

[mjstonez]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

Mike, have you reached out to Rick directly?

No I have not, I just found out yesterday and was too busy scrambling for an alternative as a worst case scenario....

[lesliekirk]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

No I have not, I just found out yesterday and was too busy scrambling for an alternative as a worst case scenario....

I do understand, I have been scrambling since Oct 1st along with so many other people. Rick is listening, really listening, so please do email him and ask that he have your site reviewed. Let him know your business situation and other details/comments that you'd like to relay.

Leslie

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

Mike,

First of all reach out to me (also you don't need to write an appeal of any sort, just ask for a price review), I promise you this is not a worst case scenario and of the people we've reviewed so far all but 1 have been happy to very happy with our solution.

Second let me address some of your points (for posterity if nothing else).

• Not to mention the $500/mo we have to spend for faceted search from a 3rd party for something that should be built into miva (being a world class product and all)

This feature is coming relatively soon and is one of the specific reasons we're doing price reviews.

It's also worth noting there's many ways to do this feature and most are bad either from a user experience standpoint or SEO or performance or all of the above. If you want to see a poor implementation look at BigCommerce's version that they only offer in their Enterprise packages.

Since different people benefit from different features (the marketing engine, b2b features, softgoods (coming next month by the way), facets (coming soon), the value they derive varies. And while we're trying to avoid the a la carte every button is a fee model, we also know the new model isn't perfect and that's why we're doing these price reviews manually.

• that cant even sort in the admin by a custom product field, we had to pay to have a module built that has that function.

This feature is also coming soon and considering most carts don't even support proper custom fields and certainly can't handle the quantity we can handle while maintaining performance, this is generally as a feature set a huge win in our column. Doing this stock so that it works if you have 2 custom fields or 200 and if you have 10 products or 1 million is what makes building it stock different than what someone likely hacked together as a custom module.

• Miva has dropped from nearly 11,000 sites to 8000 sites - looks like they will continue to drop after this.

This point is worth exploring. In actuality we've dropped from over 200,000 sites (in 2003) to roughly 8,000 today.

Yet in 2003 our company was less than a tenth of the size it is today revenue wise, less than fifth employee count wise and bleeding money so badly those 200,000 sites lived in the edge of a disaster they never truly fathomed.

This isn't just a true story for Miva, this is true today of many carts/platforms. There's currently a name brand (you'd all know it) platform with 50,000 active merchants that's being shopped for sale and they have less than 20% of our current revenue and that includes what they charge for building custom sites.

Or WooCommerce which just got sold to WordPress has 600,000 sites using it, yet their revenue was very similar to ours.

As a business person I know I'm concerned with the sustainability of a business model, because when they fall apart it's usually very bad for those left behind. You can't sustain 50,000 merchants on 20% of our revenue and you certainly can't properly support 600,000 merchants on something similar to our revenue.

So yes we do expect our merchant numbers to go down slightly yet for those who are using our product on going they will have the best feature set, uptime, support as well as a steady stream of great new features that don't break your store when they come out.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

Some other tidbits (not replying to any specific post).

As I personally (and we as a company) have worked through this with our customers over the last two weeks, we've been able to find middle ground with virtually all of our customers who've reached out.

There appears to be a general consensus (at the higher end especially) that our old pricing model didn't make sense and our pricing was too low relative to what they paid.

With that said, there was a lot of legitimate feedback about both the sticker shock and the method by which the info came out, the notice period, etc...

The pricing review process and being willing to work with clients has been immensely helpful on our end as well as for our customers.

One conversation that's happened on two occasions were with larger customers who had been long time users (and came from the world where Miva Merchant was something you received "free" with your hosting).

It's been in this specific case where there's been the largest disconnect between what we offer and sell and how our value is perceived on the clients end.

Here's some notes from those conversations that should be helpful for others:

Actual direct hosting costs are less than 5% of the total cost to operate our business, which is why charging for disk, bandwidth, servers, etc… do not work well for compensating us for what is largely a product of intellectual property.

Product development, network management (uptime) and support eat up roughly 60% of the cost of running our business, yet under the old hosting pricing model we were essentially not charging for those items.

Thus we need a different method to charge for our intellectual property.

The 5 models we’ve considered:

1. Simply raising our price a lot (to say $20k a year just for the software). This is the Magento model and we’d likely keep roughly 1,000 merchants but we’d end up losing close to 10,000 merchants in such a transition. While we’d theoretically make more money, we feel this is not an acceptable path.

2. We could go to some sort of a la carte model where every single button you click in our admin would have a fee associated with it, this in theory “directly charges for our Intellectual Property”. The problem with this model (even though for some it sounds attractive) is that your bill would become unreadable quickly, you’d have a very hard time predicting your price and it would be very hard to sell to new customers since we wouldn’t know your usage ahead of time. This model is how our data center charges us and as a customer on the receiving end of this model, it’s not a good experience.

3. Pageviews. We could offer plans that convert page views into price. This is fairly common in the world of SaaS. It’s also punishing to people on low margins, people who get a DDoS attack or even get crawled a lot by bots.

4. Transactions. We could sell buckets of transactions, where in essence up to 100 is X price, up to 500 is y price, etc… It also punishes people on low margins and low average order values.

5. Gross revenue. This is our choice right now (and we’re looking closely at it and making some adjustments, which is why we’re manually reviewing people’s pricing), this at some level punishes people with large average order values, but solves the other end of the equation.

At the end of the day hosting has become a commodity while our cost of doing business has skyrocketed (for programmers, network engineers, etc…) so the old model of disk and bandwidth has to go away.

The middle ground we’ve found today is to use Gross Revenue as a proxy for usage, while reviewing specific sites as requested and being reasonable and flexible while listening in those discussions.

[TFo]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

Rick,

Correct me if I'm wrong here. Creating an order in Admin and adding parts to it added to adds to the sales totals. That, of course, makes sense. Here's the part where I may be wrong. I'm under the impression from looking at those sales numbers some time ago that the sales totals don't go down when we delete an order.

If that's the case, we need a system that creates quotes that can then be converted to orders. Many times, we'll take a customer's phone call, and they'll ask for a total of several items with shipping and tax. We sometimes get the order and sometimes we don't. If not, we delete that order.

Thanks,
Todd

[PaulTAT]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

We have a small store that takes an average of 2 orders per day, maybe 3 orders on a good day. In the last year we've gone from $50 per month to $150 per month and now we receive an email telling us that we're now going to be charged $250 per month? Sometimes we go three, four days without an order being placed.

We ate the last increase but charging us $250 per month to process less than a dozen orders each week is beyond the pale and after sharing the email this morning I have received the go ahead to research alternatives. Congratulations, I guess.

[lesliekirk]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

We have a small store that takes an average of 2 orders per day, maybe 3 orders on a good day. In the last year we've gone from $50 per month to $150 per month and now we receive an email telling us that we're now going to be charged $250 per month? Sometimes we go three, four days without an order being placed.

We ate the last increase but charging us $250 per month to process less than a dozen orders each week is beyond the pale and after sharing the email this morning I have received the go ahead to research alternatives. Congratulations, I guess.

Please send an email to Rick - all he needs is the URL to your store and "request review".

[PaulTAT]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

Please send an email to Rick - all he needs is the URL to your store and "request review".

I emailed support and within 3 minutes received a form letter telling me that they don't make mistakes and that Miva is the best value in ecommerce.

The quickest reply I've ever had from support, by the way!

[lesliekirk]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

FYI - it does take a couple of days for the folks doing the review to get back to you.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

I emailed support and within 3 minutes received a form letter telling me that they don't make mistakes and that Miva is the best value in ecommerce.

The quickest reply I've ever had from support, by the way!

You did not email support asking for a price review as discussed in this thread; you simply asked to be put on a plan other than the one that was assigned without giving any further information, such as "Your revenue calculation was wrong" or similar. The response stated that our new plan assignments are based on revenue, that our transaction reporting which is used to determine that is very accurate, and that data is what was used to determine the new plan. The original email from us gave the plan list at http://www.miva.com/miva-pricing-update with the revenue tiers.

If you believe our revenue calculations are incorrect for your site, that can be addressed with support. If you believe our calculation is likely accurate and your use case is unusual to the point that the new pricing model will unfairly impact your business, that's what has been discussed in this thread and what should be emailed to Rick so he can get it into the review process.

[lesliekirk]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

You did not email support asking for a price review as discussed in this thread; you simply asked to be put on a plan other than the one that was assigned without giving any further information, such as "Your revenue calculation was wrong" or similar. The response stated that our new plan assignments are based on revenue, that our transaction reporting which is used to determine that is very accurate, and that data is what was used to determine the new plan. The original email from us gave the plan list at http://www.miva.com/miva-pricing-update with the revenue tiers.

If you believe our revenue calculations are incorrect for your site, that can be addressed with support. If you believe our calculation is likely accurate and your use case is unusual to the point that the new pricing model will unfairly impact your business, that's what has been discussed in this thread and what should be emailed to Rick so he can get it into the review process.

David,

I think a clear and concise method of requesting a review needs to be posted and also passed on to devs that are trying to assist their store owners through this process. I may have misunderstood Rick when I was talking with him yesterday, but he said the review process was as simple as emailing support with the store URL and request review. If I have misunderstood that, my apologizes.

Leslie

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

David,

I think a clear and concise method of requesting a review needs to be posted and also passed on to devs that are trying to assist their store owners through this process. I may have misunderstood Rick when I was talking with him yesterday, but he said the review process was as simple as emailing support with the store URL and request review. If I have misunderstood that, my apologizes.

Leslie

That is all that is necessary Leslie; his email made no mention of wanting a review, just asked the plan to be changed, so the person who replied thought it was a misunderstanding over how the new plan assignments were determined.

[PaulTAT]

Re: Update on Pricing from Miva, Inc.

You did not email support asking for a price review as discussed in this thread; you simply asked to be put on a plan other than the one that was assigned without giving any further information, such as "Your revenue calculation was wrong" or similar.

This is correct. I emailed support before I read this thread and learned of the fabled "pricing review" process. After I read Leslie's post I immediately emailed Rick asking for a price review. I do apologize for not using the magic phrase "price review" in my initial email but I was unaware of its existence. Besides, I would imagine someone reading my email would be able to understand the context despite it lacking certain approved keywords.