The single greatest advantage to Miva Merchant is its flexibility. There are no limits on the number of customers, products, categories, or pages.
Sewing Parts Online is an online retailer of sewing machines, parts, and accessories. With an average of over 200 orders per day, the company has fulfilled over 200,000 orders since they’ve opened. SewingPartsOnline.com launched in late 2008, as an extension to their retail store located in Tennessee.
Owners, George & Terri Kocourek, along with Co-Owner, Jeremy Kocourek, started the website because they saw a void in the online sewing community. There were many websites where people could buy sewing machine parts, but when it came to finding a specific part of a machine, it was a hassle. That is why Sewing Parts Online offers over 14,000 sewing machine, serger parts, and accessories on their online store in an organized and easy-to-use database. Sewing Parts Online also offers “How To” tutorial videos on their blog, called SPO TV. In their tutorials, they share all types of DIY tips, tricks, and projects to engage their customers and inspire them to sew.
With nearly 13 years of combined experience repairing sewing machines, Sewing Parts Online can almost guarantee that if they still make the part, they can get it for you.
Network Solutions vs. Miva Merchant
“Previously we were using Network Solutions for our shopping cart platform. Netsol was very limiting in regards to what we could change, build in and automate. Our main reasons to switch were the limits of the cart. Netsol had a limit of 3,000 categories that we had already reached over a year ago, so that was severely limiting our company’s growth potential,” said SPO Co-Owner, Jeremy Kocourek.
Sewing Parts Online went live on Miva Merchant February 28, 2013. After finishing their first official month on Miva Merchant, they beat their biggest month ever with a 3% increase in revenue.
“The main reason we picked Miva Merchant over other carts was because of Miva’s willingness to answer all of our questions and find solutions to all of the problems that we had,” explained Jeremy Kocourek.
For example, Network Solutions’ Ecommerce Platform (formerly Monster Commerce) is built with .aspx extensions, so finding a cart that could retain those extensions was critical in maintaining their search rankings. Even though Miva Merchant doesn’t natively use .aspx extensions, Miva was able to come up with a workable solution to keep those extensions in place while still using Miva Merchant.
A Smooth Transition
Since changing platforms, Sewing Parts Online has smoothly transitioned without their customers or the search engine bots noticing any difference at all. It is important to Sewing Parts Online to make changes only with solid A/B data to back up their ideas. Miva Merchant is currently building a one page checkout their store and then will perform an A/B test for their multi-step design to see which performs best with their demographic.
In addition, Miva Merchant website developers have created a ‘quick find’ feature for Sewing Parts Online, in order to organize the more than 600 sub-categories under a single category. Before the ‘quick find’ feature, customers had to scroll through a list of 600+ model numbers to find their specific machine. Now, there is a search bar at the top of each category page that customers can type their model number information into, and it will automatically filter out all sub-categories that don’t have that specific model number in them.
“The single greatest advantage to Miva Merchant is its flexibility,” said Jeremy Kocourek. “There are no limits on the number of customers, products, categories, or pages. The platform allows for complete control of all aspects of the store. The modules, certified developers, and product documentation help make customization incredibly straightforward.”
