Keeping up with customer expectations is not an easy task for a company relying on an outdated homegrown platform. Learn how the 100-year-old flower company Interflora UK modernized its eCommerce infrastructure in only nine months to deliver one-of-a-kind shopping experiences.
Receiving a bouquet, perfectly hand-crafted and hand-delivered, is so much more than a bunch of flowers: It’s a thoughtful message, a heartfelt thank you, a celebratory hug or a romantic gesture. Since 1923, Interflora UK has taken on the mission to convey messages of love and caring through one-of-a-kind bouquets and floral arrangements that proudly connect 900 local artisan florists with customers throughout the United Kingdom, Ireland and around the globe. In a hundred years of history, the company has blossomed into the world’s largest flower delivery network.
Since its inception, Interflora UK created a service where customers could place an order via the communication mode of the day: First the telegram, then the telephone and, now, online. A true chameleon in adapting to new ways of reaching out to customers, Interflora UK invested early in eCommerce with an in-house built platform, which cemented its position, at the time, as a leader. The company built three webshops (Interflora UK, Interflora Ireland and Flying Flowers), two of them based on the open-source software Perl, and another on a Java platform.
As commerce and customer experiences continued to evolve, resting on its laurels wasn’t an option. Interflora UK’s homegrown architecture could no longer meet customer expectations and became increasingly rigid and expensive to maintain. Other issues crept in over time that became unsustainable, such as a costly year-round high-availability hosting service to accommodate just three seasonal spikes around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas.
Interflora UK’s webshops weren’t able to cope with the eCommerce performance required by shoppers, such as speed and mobile responsiveness. The legacy platform also prevented the company from adapting and customizing shopper experiences, which hurt the bottom line, and became increasingly difficult to operate and maintain for its in-house tech team.
As Interflora UK’s mission became progressively hard to deliver with the old architecture, it was time to reset its eCommerce infrastructure to keep delivering on the company’s promise… And wow our customers once again.
IT Director, Interflora UK
A new beginning blooms with composable commerce
Once Interflora UK decided to transform its eCommerce footprint, the first step was to run a technical discovery process. To help unearth the best course of action, the company worked with Gradient Edge, an expert consulting firm in modern commerce, and Profound, a customer experience design agency.
Initially, the company considered a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) with a set of technologies designed to enable the composition, management, delivery and optimization of digital experiences. However, it soon became clear that future-proofing the customer experience required unfettered freedom on the frontend UX and the ability to serve multiple channels. That’s when the company decided that a composable architecture following the principles of MACH® would be the best fit for its requirements.
Thanks to Gradient Edge’s Composable Commerce Keystone Accelerator, the team at Interflora UK ran a pilot project to demonstrate how to orchestrate the best-of-breed architecture via a GraphQL layer. It was also vital to validate key design decisions during the MVP (minimum viable product) stage, such as personalization and frontend management. Lastly, since the company set its sights on an API-first commerce platform with cloud-native, event-driven and serverless integration patterns, the MVP phase also tested the waters in how to handle complex enterprise-wide information flows and business logic via microservices.
After a three-month closed beta release, we moved to minimum viable product and minimum marketable product (MMP) phases quickly, increasing the confidence that composable commerce is robust, maintainable and sustainable for Interflora UK’s in-house engineering teams. After all, we aimed at self-sufficiency from the get-go.
IT Director, Interflora UK
The company chose to soft-launch the Interflora Ireland site, quickly followed by Interflora UK and finally, Flying Flowers. In only six months, the company replatformed from its homegrown commerce solution to commercetools Composable Commerce across three websites, and completed its best-of-breed ecosystem with Algolia for search, Amplience for CMS, Worldpay for payments and Pimberly for PIM — all seamlessly integrated via cloud-native architecture powered by Microsoft Azure.
For its frontend architecture, the team at Interflora UK built its digital storefronts using React and Next.js, utilizing a server-side-generated architecture to deliver blazingly fast and robust performance.
Unleashing Interflora UK’s flower eCommerce power
Following an agile framework and counting on the support of partners to implement a composable stack, Interflora UK launched all three sites in just nine months and reaped a bouquet of benefits for a rosy future:
By moving from an in-house hosted solution to a multi-site, multi-tenant SaaS offering, the company reduced annual hosting costs by 20%.
With cloud-native architecture powered by Microsoft Azure, Interflora UK massively improved its ability to cope with increased website load. Now, the company has a high-performance static site generated pages and single page app approach, which has slashed downtime across three webshops and can fly through traffic peaks during Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, etc.
Search engine optimization (SEO) rankings improved due to a high-performing website and mobile responsiveness.
With a flexible infrastructure, it’s now possible to design and launch campaigns in days, not weeks — leading to increased sales conversions.
Developers can now create, update and scale new functionalities faster, leading to improved release frequency.
What we have all achieved in this project over the course of a year has been nothing short of monumental! To have built and launched the full tech stack we have in nine months is truly amazing.
IT Director, Interflora UK
Key to such a resounding success has been a well-architected accelerator from Gradient Edge coupled with a small, highly skilled and cross-functional team that enabled strong technical governance throughout the project delivery. The ongoing upskilling of Interflora UK’s engineering teams with extensive knowledge transfer was also crucial to the company to ensure self-sufficiency on the tech side. Lastly, integrating all best-of-breed vendors was achieved on time and within budget, including the decommissioning of the legacy stack and its related costs.
And the most amazing result of all: With a flexible and agile infrastructure powered by composable commerce, Interflora UK is primed to create customer experiences that do justice to the gorgeous blooms crafted by its flower artisans. The company can even expand the flower experience, such as the Interflora World Cup, a once-in-a-lifetime floristry event to experience the world’s greatest floral design competition.
With composable commerce, Interflora UK is ready to continue delivering messages of love well into the next hundred years!
Has your company outgrown its homegrown commerce platform? Download our migration guide and learn how to move from a homegrown platform to commercetools Composable Commerce.
Manuela Marques Tchoe is a Content Writer at commercetools. She was a Content and Product Marketing Director at conversational commerce provider tyntec. She has written content in partnership with Facebook, Rakuten Viber and other social media platforms.