FlowerShop – Ecommerce Leader

The Client

A family-owned business, FlowerShop.com has been serving the Phoenix Valley since 1972. With locations in Scottsdale, Phoenix, Mesa, Glendale, and Tempe, FlowerShop approached us with the challenge of revamping their web presence to hit their goal of $10 million in web revenue. We built them a fresh, clean platform for branding.

Client Requirement

The client wanted Professional Website Redesign/Revamp services with an e-commerce platform execution for all of his 5 floral gift websites. At that time, 3 of the 5 Websites were on a Teleflora platform and 2 on proprietary solutions. Similar functionality and layout were needed to be implemented for all 5 brands, with unique branding applied to each site. A universal content management system was required to support all 5 sites. Centralized managed hosting services were also required. Key success measures included centralized control of all websites, enhanced usability, and site conversion rates to ultimately drive additional revenue, moving the company toward their goal of $10M in online revenue.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

• Brand name FlowerShop.com is one of the largest assets
• 46% of all visits in 2006 to FlowerShop.com were direct
• 17% of total traffic in 2006 from returning visitors, so 29% of direct visitors
• Keyword “flower shop” was #1 term driving organic traffic from all search engines
• Top five keywords in both sponsored and organic search were variations of this term such as “Flowershop” and “Flowershop.com”
• Loyal customer base: 35% of sales in 2006 from return customers
• FlowerShop.com blog – a Web 2.0 technology not yet widely used in the floral gift industry; top competitors in the market do not offer the community aspect of a blog, which gives a differentiating attribute in the market

Weaknesses

• The very old system with outdated applications; technical glitches are common; a challenge to make enhancements
• Struggled to compete with much more sophisticated e-commerce websites
• Exceptionally low conversion rate at less than 1%; standard for e-commerce is 2.7%, however, the top competitors in the floral gift market hover around 15% or greater
• Wire service business model, which generated a very low-profit margin; made up most of the transactions on FlowerShop.com
• Majority of online florists dealt with challenges that come with wire service, being price competitive with the top online florists was virtually impossible, as these companies were shipping wholesale-direct

Opportunities

• Still in its infancy in terms of brand presence and market share
• New Website design will foster improved, more intuitive user experience, leading to higher conversion rates
• If traffic levels remain constant, raising conversion rate by less than one point equates to over $1 million in sales
• The new platform will allow increased attention to the existing customer base: communicate more effectively, promote brand affinity with the ability to manage reminder & transaction email content.
• RTI update will offer a loyalty program, a feature requested the recently conducted survey
• Attract more customers, sell more to existing customers, and generate more profit through sales of drop-ship products from third-party vendors
• Add more products from vendors currently sold, promote these brands more
• Explore new relationships and continue to grow non-floral gift selection
• International shipping, which will also be offered on the new platform?

Threats

• Low-priced competition; 1800Flowers.com and ProFlowers.com offer an attractive product at an even more attractive price; owed market share majority
• Aggressive competitor marketing –via online and offline mediums, including television and radio were creating brand recognition that FlowerShop.com was unable to compete with.
• Competitor large marketing budgets also keep them in the top three positions on every 1st-tier search engine; 39% of every online purchase started at a search engine, these businesses were highly visible to the majority of online customers
• Long-term customer benefits; competition offers attractive loyalty programs that give their customers a reason to shop with them

Project Phases

Case Studies – FlowerShop Design – 15 days Case Studies – FlowerShop Development & Beta Delivery – 60 days Case Studies – FlowerShop Testing, Load Test & Launch – 30 days

Tools & Technologies Used

Microft Dot Net: Probably the most popular IDE for Windows Applications and Web Applications.

MySQL: Consistently stable in high volume data environment with a wide range of support available for free over various forums and support portals. The preferred database used with Microsoft .Net oriented applications and other languages.

Crystal Reports: Crystal Reports is a business intelligence application used to design and generate reports from a wide range of data sources. Several other applications, such as Microsoft Visual Studio, bundle an OEM version of Crystal Reports as a general purpose reporting tool.

Manpower

Case Studies – FlowerShop Project Leader – 1 Case Studies – FlowerShop Team Leader – 1 Case Studies – FlowerShop Web Developers – 2 Case Studies – FlowerShop Web Designers – 1 Case Studies – FlowerShop Quality Assurance Testers – 1

Planning

With the prior experience in Web developing, web-based applications; SDI followed a Multi-tire approach towards the development starting from:

• The Database layer containing MS SQL Server Database, Tables, Stored procedures, User Defined Functions, Views, and so on.
• The Data Access layer containing the libraries responsible for accessing data from the database.
• The Business Logic layer consisting of all business logic procedures for modules like User Profiles, Recommendations module Deals Generation & management module, Report generations, etc
• The User Interface Layer which forms the Graphical User Interface of the website.

Architecture

ASP.NET has a collection of objects that helps to create easy “user interfaces” for developers. These objects are server controls that you can place into .aspx pages. When a web page is served up by the server to a client machine, the pages are rendered as HTML. The pages execute on the server and generate HTML code that is inserted into the outgoing HTML stream. The browser sees the pages as HTML, whereas the ASP.NET page and developer see them as controls.

The website has a lot of features like finding the next available delivery date based on the zip code, based on the vendor, customer information, occasion reminders, address book management, order management and many other features that were developed on this website.

The website files consist of all the layers for respective modules in which the Business logic layer has many functions that act as a mediator to transfer the data from the Application layer. The data access layer is also a class that we used to set and get the data “to and fro” from the database. This layer is used to communicate with the database. We wrote the stored procedures to access the data from the database or to perform any operations to the database.