IT – Ourea

The Idea of PortraitflipPortraitflip is a Pune based venture started in the year 2017. It was a start-up idea born in the hostel room of Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Chennai. Portraitflip bloomed when one of the founders was in search of handmade paintings to gift his friend. Mr. Lavdeep Chahal identified the gap, realized the potential market of handmade paintings, and came up with the idea of Portraitflip. With the support of his friends Sunny Choudary and Shubhanshu Maheshwari, the team started working on the venture.The trio team identified the potential of the handmade paintings in the market and started to work on Portraitflip. Portraitflip was registered officially in 2018 as the ultimate hub to create genuine handmade paintings from photographs. The squad began to work on their woo-commerce website. Portraitflip received the best start-up award from VIT, Chennai, thus adding the confidence of the founders. The idea started to bloom. The founders were confident enough to start their first office in Pune.The Growth of PortraitflipThe Pune based startup started to grow steadily with orders from all around the world. Portraitflip began to expand its human capital by searching for skilled and talented artists. The team also set their studios to commence and complete their painting works. The team also introduced its quality control team to ensure detailing, packaging strength, and subject execution with changes. The group started with 12 artisans, expanded to 100 skilled and talented artisans who were handpicked to create masterpiece paintings.How Portraitflip Works? The potential customers place their orders by uploading the photographs on Portraitflip’s website. The desired medium and size needed for the paintings need to be selected. Portraitflip offers six mediums: acrylic, charcoal, watercolor, colored pencil, pencil, and oil. The paintings are provided in three options: framed, rolled, and gallery wrapped. After the order gets placed, Portraitflip will connect to their studios and commence the work. Upon completion of the painting, a photograph of the painting is sent to the customer for approval. At this stage, any changes or modifications are available. To avoid delays and miscommunication, Portraitflip tied up with DHL and FedEx. The shipping was delivered usually within 24 days. If the client required express delivery, a shipping charge was added, and the paintings were delivered within 14days.The Dilemma Everything was set up perfectly, the website was built, artisans were handpicked, shipping was tied up with DHL and FedEx, and of course, the traffic was increasing as well. But the sales conversion was not happening in proportion to the traffic. Something was wrong. The traffic created was lost somewhere. Of course, the potential market was still alive, but the leads did not convert to sales.The woo-commerce website, Portraitflip.com, was remarked as slow by the users. Apart from the speed, users faced difficulties in uploading. The clients were not able to upload multiple images. The users also complained about the process of placing the order. The order flow was not structured. The number of stages to place an order was remarked by the users as cumbersome and long. The potential users got dropped in the process of placing the order. The reasons for the low conversion rate were identified. Portraitflip was in need of External IT support. Portraitflip began their research for an IT support that promised a complete overhaul of the order process that defaulted in woo-commerce by building a complete order page.The WordPress experts at Ourea did not find the problem of Portraitflip complicated. Apart from the order process Ourea also suggested speed and security optimisation for improving server response times. This made sense to the Portraitflip team and Ourea took up the project.The IT Support - OureaAccording to reports, 1 in 4 visitors would leave the website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. Again 46% of users don’t revisit slow performing websites. Thus the first change Ourea made was to change the hosting to FlexiCloud Internet’s Managed Cloud Hosting, which leverages the speed and uptime of Digital Ocean. FlexiCloud was too good in setting up a custom web server for portrait flip, with Nginx php7.4 and MariaDB, with Redis caching at no additional cost. Portraitflip also suggested implementing digital ocean spaces for content delivery, which we implemented with ease.The migration of the website to FlexiCloud and the Content delivery system improved the page load speed by 25%. We also implemented a high level of page and object caching. This further reduced the page load speed by an additional 10%. Along with that, the security headers we added improved the overall security and reduced the risk of any potential threats.Ourea also identified another main reason for low conversion. The main problem faced by users of Portraitflip.com was that the relevant aspects for placing the order were scattered, and the users got confused and irritated. The order flow of the website was the first thing that needed to be fixed. Naman Modi structured the process of placing the order. The need to reload the webpage to place the order was taken care of. From the start page, the user can choose the category. Only the product relevant to the category was displayed to the user to shop. After selection, the user can add to the cart, from where the painting’s price was added considering the size and medium required. The cumbersome and lengthy process of placing the order was now comfortable and user-friendly. The customers were also able to add multiple images simultaneously on the website. Thus the team headed by our CTO, Naman Modi created a custom order flow for the website i.e. Portraitflip.com.The Present PortraitflipPortraitflip has grown to be one of the best E-Commerce Websites to get handmade paintings in India. Ourea’s IT support helped Portraitflip to increase their sales by three hundred percent. The traffic generated was now being converted to sales to meet the expected conversion rate. Isn’t that inspiring? Ourea promises to help you with our web development and IT support. We assure you of 24*7 support and hassle-free hosting. Upgrade your website with our IT support and grow your business.

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