Here’s how Concurrent Seat Licensing works with the Miva Merchant software. Although you can create an unlimited number of users at no additional cost to you. The Miva Merchant software only comes with a single concurrent user license, which means that only user can be logged in to the admin at a time. Stores that require multiple users to be logged in at a time, will need to purchase additional concurrency licenses to accommodate their needs. Lastly, if you use an automated service that connects to your Miva Merchant store, such as Miva Synchro or Stoneedge you may want to consider purchasing an additional seat license for your automated service. Although this isn't required, it will help to ensure that you don't interrupt an automated services attempt to connect to your store while you're logged into to the admin. If you have multiple automated services that connect to your store, a single additional seat is sufficient to accommodate them all. If a user attempts to log into a store that already has the maximum number of seats used, they will be presented with the lockout screen. The lock-out screen behaves slightly different depending on whether the user account is a store admin or a user with non admin permissions. Let's have a look at a couple of examples. If a non admin user attempts to log into a store and there are no open seats available, they will see this lock out screen. It displays who are currently in the store admin and how long each user account has been idle. The user has the option to purchase additional seat licenses here, or they can try logging in again when a seat becomes available. In this case, the account occupying the seat is mrs. user who is just in the next room. Mr. user can ask her if she's done with her admin session. If she is and she can log out freeing up the seat which mr. user can then login with. Let's say mr. user logs into the store from home to get some early-morning reporting done. Then he drives into the office, but forget to log out of his home computer. When he goes to login to the store at the office, the Miva Merchant software will see that the user account is already listed as the seat occupant. So mr. user will be able to login to the store from the office computer without a hitch, at which time the admin session at home will automatically be logged off. If a user with admin rights attempts to log in while all seats are occupied, their lock out screen will look a little different. They will see everything we mentioned before, but have some additional features. They will be able to see the IP addresses that users are logging in from and they will also have the option of kicking off any of the current users, freeing up the seat for them to log in with. I's important to understand that users that are locked out this way will not get any warning messages that they were kicked out and they will lose any work that they were working on if it wasn't saved. Note that if an admin user attempts to login from multiple locations they will not automatically end their earlier session the way non admin users do. Instead they will still be taken to this lockout page and they will have the option to kick their older session out or any other user to free up seats. So how many seats will your store need? That's a question that has a different answer for each Miva Merchant store. A good majority of the stores out there are likely to require a single concurrent seat. There are a few metrics in the store admin that might help you find out how many seats are right for you. If you're still running Miva Merchant 5.5 you can glance at some admin session statistics right from the home screen. Here you can see the total number of admin sessions, how many of those sessions are currently active and how many unique user accounts are currently logged in. Lastly, you can see what you're all time highest number of sessions you've ever had active in your store at one time. The most useful of these numbers to keep an eye on is probably the active sessions number. This will give you an idea of your store Administration habits and can influence your decision on how many seats you may need.