ProStores Helps Family Business Become the Life of the Party
ProStores made things easier for us and helped us grow our business. It's a stable system that's not expensive.
Cristhiam Bucheli, Owner of
World of Piñatas
World of Piñatas
When Cristhiam Bucheli was a boy, he remembers his grandfather making piñatas by hand and selling them to local stores in Florida. His grandfather then passed the craft down to Cristhiam’s parents, Mario and Susanna.
Now they’re spreading his grandfather’s piñatas around the world, expanding that local business into a burgeoning international online party supply storefront called World of Piñatas. Cristhiam and his wife Jennifer run the business side, while Mario and Susanna create and produce the piñatas.
A Brand you can Trust
"Bringing his family's craft to the world began with eBay. "We started putting piñatas on eBay eight years ago," Cristhiam recalls. "They sold there so we decided to open a web store. It just made more sense for us to reach a bigger audience and was less expensive for us in terms of fees. We went with ProStores because it had eBay behind it. It was all about trust."
Once they added ProStores as a sales channel, the Buchelis’ business took off. “When we started on eBay, we sold five piñatas a day. When we started selling 200 a month, we opened the web store. Now we sell 450 items a month.”
ProStores lets Cristhiam control all his eBay, eBay Store and ProStores inventory from one interface. He also appreciates ProStores’ customer support and continual evolution. “At the beginning, we had hiccups here and there. The ProStores team was very helpful. And the new improvements have made things easier for people, like me, who aren’t programmers.”
User-friendly for Merchants and Shoppers
That ease is especially apparent in the way Cristhiam uses Page Builder, which allows him to create and save different store versions, go back and forth between them, and publish the ones he likes. "I can copy and paste code between Page Builder and Adobe Dreamweaver. It's a good way to do graphics. Before I didn't update my pages too often, but now I do."
Cristhiam uses robust ProStores features to make his store user-friendly. With Product Attributes, shoppers can choose product colors, sizes and patterns and automatically see the corresponding pricing. The Options feature lets customers personalize party products, like birthday posters.
If that's not enough to bring in a sale, ProStores reports help Cristhiam recapture carts he may have otherwise lost. Every morning he checks his ProStores order log for the previous day's abandoned carts. He then sends those shoppers an email asking if they need any further help with checkout. Using the Promotions feature he offers them a discount code, which he can track to see how many carts he converts.
Once he gets a sale, PayPal simplifies his order management and bulk mailing. Add-on tool Constant Contact has also helped Cristhiam revamp his email marketing to get repeat customers. "We have a database of 2,000 email addresses, so using Outlook was very confusing. Constant Contact is much easier to control."
A Second Storefront
Since the Buchelis added ProStores, their business has grown by $25,000 each year. Ten thousand unique visitors come to World of Piñatas every month, giving the web store $130,000 in annual sales.
Now the Buchelis are using ProStores to think about the future. Since piñatas are somewhat seasonal, they are diversifying into different party products. They’re also considering opening a second ProStores web storefront to sell other crafts. They recommend ProStores so much that they’ve even used it to help a friend open her own web storefront.
“ProStores made things easier for us and helped us grow our business. It’s a stable system that’s not expensive. It has good traffic generation and marketing features. I don’t think there’s any other system out there as complete as ProStores,” Cristhiam concludes.
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