The evolution of Miva Merchant continues. The shopping cart was first launched in 1995 as “HTML Script.” It then renamed itself Miva and quickly gained market share in the late 1990s, largely by selling licensed copies to hosting companies.
The company suffered with the first dot-com bust, and ultimately sold itself to FindWhat.com, a publicly-traded pay-per-click ad network. This was in 2004. FindWhat.com subsequently renamed itself Miva and then divested the shopping-cart portion of its business to private investors, who named the newly acquired business “Miva Merchant.” This was in 2007.
Those private investors include Russ Carroll, a seasoned technology entrepreneur who is the majority owner of the company, and Rick Wilson, who is now the firm’s executive vice president. Wilson worked for Miva prior to it being sold to FindWhat.com, and he also previously worked for Carroll at Providence Systems, a training company.
Carroll and Wilson have worked to restore Miva Merchant’s standing among the developer community, as well as improving the core product for ecommerce merchants themselves. They’ve also refined the company’s business model, away from inexpensive, one-time-license sales to hosts, and into recurring-revenue type of sales.
The first step towards this business-model shift occurred last spring, when Miva Merchant launched its “distributed SaaS” model. With this, hosting companies that had previously purchased Miva Merchant licenses, and were hosting the ecommerce sites from those licenses, were required to pay recurring monthly payments to Miva Merchant for ongoing support and for upgrades to the core shopping cart product. According to Wilson, virtually all of its participating hosts agreed to do this.
Miva Merchant is now announcing a fully-hosted business model, one that allows the company to host the ecommerce sites itself without relying on third-party hosting companies. The company calls this new, hosted platform “Miva Merchant SaaS,” with monthly prices for it ranging from $59.95 to $129.95.
To explain the new platform, Rick Wilson, the executive vice president, visited with Practical eCommerce’s Kerry Murdock.
Kerry Murdock: Miva Merchant is now offering an in-house hosted version of its shopping cart software. Could you tell us about this new product?
Murdock: To date, you’ve been relying on third-party hosting companies. Are you abandoning these hosts?
Wilson: “No. We’re not abandoning our hosting partners at all. Our take on it is a couple of things. One is that the people who currently have relationships with hosts oftentimes are resellers, oftentimes they are web designers or web developers and that ecosystem works perfectly. We want to continue supporting that and foresee supporting that indefinitely.
Murdock: Earlier in the year, Miva Merchant launched what it called “distributed SaaS.” How has that gone for you?
Murdock: So, will the distributed SAAS product stay in place, too?
Murdock: If a hosting company wants an ecommerce solution to offer to its customers, is there any concern in your mind that by moving to a hosted solution, your hosting partners will find another ecommerce solution to offer to its customers?
Murdock: Going back to your distributed SAAS product, has that helped you or hurt you in terms of revenue and profits?
Murdock: Can you tell us your revenue this year?
Murdock: What’s the new hosted version called and how much does it cost?
Murdock: Is there a transaction percentage on top of those costs?
Murdock: What’s the rough difference between the $59.95 version and the $129.95 version?
Murdock: What percentage of businesses that are using Miva Merchant currently would fit into that $59.95 version?
Murdock: Is the new Miva Merchant SaaS PA-DSS certified?
Murdock: If a merchant asks you to recommend Miva Merchant on a distributed SaaS (with a third-party host), or host it directly with Miva Merchant, what you going to tell him or her?
Wilson: “It’s really not going to make a lot of difference unless he or she is using a low quality host. If a merchant comes to me who is using our premier hosting partners and says, ‘Hey, I’m at ABC host over here and we know they’re one of the best Miva hosts. Should I switch to you?’ The answer is no. Stay where you are.
Screen capture of Miva Merchant’s home page.
Murdock: Do you still sell a retail, licensed version of your cart?
Murdock: How much is that?
Murdock: All told, how many companies run their stores on Miva Merchant carts?
Murdock: What’s your long-term goal for Miva Merchant?
Wilson: “Our long-term goal is to provide the platform and the technology necessary for small and medium-sized businesses to operate their online presence. Now, that can expand in a lot of ways. Our next major update is coming out here end of this year, or the very beginning of 2010. This version will be PA-DSS certified. We’ve extended that to include a whole lot of order processing and back-end functionality.
“We have now started extending the paradigm of what our product is designed to do and ultimately we want our merchants to be able to offer their end shoppers a best in breed, world-class shopping experience. There shouldn’t be a material difference between shopping at Amazon.com and shopping at one of our customer’s stores. The customer service, the speed of the site, the elegance of the site, all of that should be very similar. We need to provide the tools that allow merchants to run that business.