Miva liberates a world art dealer from an outdated Yahoo Merchant site to deliver a stunning modern shopping experience.
Lotus Sculpture founder Kyle Tortora shares his passion for beautiful hand-crafted works of Eastern art from India, Thailand, and Cambodia via a unique online marketplace.
I'm an extraordinarily fortunate person who is living his dream each day.
Kyle Tortora |When Kyle launched the Lotus Sculpture website in 2000, he chose Yahoo Merchant Services as his ecommerce platform. But the limits of this familiar brand's software became immediately apparent.
Yahoo made it impossible to create a refined, modern shopping experience appropriate to Lotus Sculpture's sophisticated concept. "At first it was just small things I wanted to do, but couldn't," Kyle says. "But over time, a bunch of small changes you can't make all aggregate into a website with a look and feel that's completely dated."
Kyle encountered endless problems as he tried to work with Yahoo Merchant Services to improve Yahoo's cookie-cutter product display and clunky checkout. "There was no relationship with a designer on their end. I was just one of a hundred faceless accounts."
With Miva, I write an email with the changes I need and they're done in a week.
Kyle Tortora |Kyle chose to rebuild the Lotus Sculpture website using Miva as his ecommerce platform. From the beginning of the development and migration process, he found working with Miva to be a highly personalized and invigorating experience.
"With Miva I have someone who works directly on my account, and they helped me give Lotus Sculpture a vastly upgraded look and feel. We went from Web 1.0 to a modern design."
Miva worked with Kyle to build an online presence that matches the high-end products available through Lotus Sculpture. Product display was dramatically overhauled, with a wealth of visual content, zoom features, and highly effective product videos.
The new fully responsive Lotus Sculpture website offers users a consistent shopping experience across devices. Miva seamlessly integrates with UPS shipping software and label printing, a feature which alone saves 10 hours per month. "The back-end integrations make such a big difference," he says. "For someone like me running a lean business, the time savings is so important."
Because he has dedicated Miva development help, it is much easier for Tortora to make ongoing changes to his site, such as optimizing checkout flow to highlight shipping options early in the process, a key selling point for retail sculpture. This kind of customization was not possible with Yahoo. "With Miva," Kyle says, "I write an email with the changes I need and they're done in a week."
With Miva I'm able to fully implement the vision I have for Lotus Sculpture.
Kyle Tortora |Since switching to Miva, Lotus Sculpture's revenue is up 180% , and mobile traffic doubled almost immediately upon launch of the responsive site. Sales via mobile are up by over 100%.
By choosing Miva, Kyle says he has completely taken care of the ecommerce platform for his business. "My goal isn't to have a bunch of employees," he explains. Instead of having to stay up-to-date on the latest web technology, Tortora has the power and expertise of Miva running his site for him. "With Miva I'm able to fully implement the vision I have. I'm an extraordinarily fortunate person who is living his dream each day."