Dear Lighthouse Trails reader,
For over 13 years, Lighthouse Trails has used an online-store shopping-cart platform called Miva Merchant. It worked very well for us and was quite affordable. However, over the years, Miva began increasing their prices more and more. Then about a month ago, while we were making plans to renew our yearly license with them (which was $995/year per store), we learned that their new price for non-hosted companies had gone up to $19,995.00 per year. We had received no notice of this substantial hike in fees. Needless to say, this was a shock to us and clearly out of our financial reach. Miva told us they wanted us to move over to a hosted plan, but that would be $9,000 a year. We realized then that we had to find a new shopping cart platform for both www.lighthousetrails.com and www.theshepherdsgarden.com, and we only had a few weeks before our license expired. We knew it would be a huge undertaking to find a good replacement, redesign two entire stores, and do a successful migration. We won’t pretend this didn’t put a tremendous burden upon us. We do all our own web work and have little outside web development help.
For the last three weeks, our small onsite crew has been working steadily to make this transition. We found an open-source company called Prestashop (open source means we don’t have to pay an annual fee anymore) that has an excellent reputation; we began learning how to operate the new platform and redesigned our two stores. This past Saturday, just two days before our Miva license would run out, we migrated our two stores over to the new platform. We worked with our dedicated server manager from Admin on Demand (an incredibly great company if you are looking for web hosting, dedicated server management, and high security) who did the actual migration and also with Chase’s Paymentech and Authorize.net to set up the credit-card gateway and processor for the new platform.
Today, May 2nd, the Lighthouse Trails store is in full operation (although we are still working on several aspects for overall improvement and ease for our customers). Both Chase and Authorize.net have tested the site, which has proven to be functioning properly and fully secure for credit card transactions.
Once you get familiar with the new store layout, we think you are going to find it much easier and more convenient to use.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT LOGGING IN: With all that said, if you are a registered customer of Lighthouse Trails store, there are some changes to how you login to the new store. You will no longer use a special login name to log in but rather will use your e-mail address. And, unfortunately, because of the secure nature of passwords, we were unable to successfully migrate over your passwords. What you will need to do is go to the login page here: https://www.lighthousetrails.com/login?back=my-account. Then, just enter your e-mail address (the one you got this e-mail with) and click where it says “Forgot Your Password.” You will then get an e-mail with instructions on how to reset your password. If you have any problems, call us at 866-876-3910, and we can assist you. Once you login to the new account, you will also be able to change your e-mail address and any other information you need to change.
If you are reading this and have never created an account at the Lighthouse Trails store, if you so desire, you may easily do so with the same link.
Keep in mind, the store account is NOT the same as the Lighthouse Trails Research e-newsletter that we e-mail out 3x a month.
Thank you for your continued interest in Lighthouse Trails.
The Editors at Lighthouse Trails
www.lighthousetrails.com
866-876-3910
P.O. Box 908
Eureka, MT 59917
