How Interflora UK modernized eCommerce to digitally bloom in only 9 months

As a first mover in online ordering for flowers and floral gifts, Interflora UK invested early in eCommerce with an in-house built platform. As the years went by, the company’s homegrown infrastructure became rigid and expensive, with the company maintaining a costly year-round high-availability hosting service to accommodate just three seasonal spikes: Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas. 

With three consumer-facing webshops (Interflora UK, Interflora Ireland and Flying Flowers), two of which were based upon custom-built Perl reaching end-of-life and another on a Java platform, the company’s eCommerce landscape was scattered and lacked mobile responsiveness. The company also found it increasingly difficult to adapt, customize and operate its eCommerce infrastructure. As a result, it became harder to meet customer expectations, which started to impact the bottom line. 

To deliver on the company’s promise to create not only gorgeous blooms but also stunning customer experiences, Interflora UK decided to undergo a digital transformation process. The main priorities included addressing technical requirements to boost its online shopping as well as SEO performance. At the same time, the company wanted to adopt a modern commerce stack, achieve technological self-sufficiency and upskill teams to, ultimately, accelerate development and innovation.

After a technical discovery process, the team at Interflora UK realized that a composable platform would be the right solution to create responsive customer experiences, instantly serve multiple channels and reduce hosting costs. The flower specialist chose to modernize its aging architecture following the principles of MACH® for all components of its tech stack. 

The first step of this digital transformation started with a pilot project to test and prove technology choices enabled by Gradient Edge’s Composable Commerce Keystone Accelerator. During this process, Interflora UK tested how the best-of-breed solutions could be integrated via a GraphQL aggregation layer, and subsequently validated key design decisions, such as how to incorporate personalization and frontend management. 

After three months of running the MVP (minimum viable product) phase, the company replatformed its three webshops in only six months with a modern tech stack that includes commercetools Composable Commerce, Algolia for search, Amplience for CMS, Worldpay for payments and Pimberly for PIM — all seamlessly integrated via cloud-native architecture powered by Microsoft Azure. Crucially, integrating all best-of-breed vendors was achieved according to the project’s estimated timeline of nine months and within budget, including the decommissioning of the legacy stack and its related costs. 

With a modernized tech stack combining the best components for every step of the customer journey, Interflora UK improved its website performance and mobile-first customer experience significantly, as well as boosted organic page views due to an SEO revamp. The company can now design new campaigns in days, not weeks — leading to increased and faster sales conversions. 

The company reduced its annual hosting costs by 20% by moving from an in-house hosted solution to a multi-site, muti-tenancy SaaS offering. With a cloud-native infrastructure, Interflora UK eliminated site downtime and can now handle online traffic peaks via a high-performance website across its three webshops.  

On the technical side, the innovation frequency accelerated with bi-weekly sprint releases and the agility to deploy changes in hours instead of days or weeks. Plus, the extensive knowledge transfer across partners and in-house engineering means Interflora UK’s team has achieved self-sufficiency to manage and evolve their digital commerce in the years to come.