Transforming 20 years of legacy ecommerce technology in nine months for Interflora
Modernising Interflora's ecommerce platforms
Interflora has been a leader in the flower industry since 1920, from its origins selling flowers virtually via telegrams through to its global ecommerce presence. In 2019, Interflora identified that their ecommerce platform, built throughout the last 20 years, was no longer fit for purpose. The leading flower retailer engaged Candyspace to work with them to select a new technology stack, identify an appropriate new architecture and implement a new design system.
BUSINESS NEED
Modernise three legacy ecommerce sites to gain a competitive advantage.
CUSTOMER DEMAND
A simple and easy to use online order process.
Challenge
Interflora UK had three consumer facing websites in operation to complete its offline telesales operation. Two of their websites were based upon a custom-built platform that had reached its 'end of life', meaning support and further platform development had ceased.
Working with outdated and constrained architecture also meant that the associated hosting costs were no longer cost efficient to maintain year-round high availability to accommodate just peak traffic spikes.
To improve operational efficiencies and streamline the digital customer experience, we decided to undergo a Discovery period before consolidating all three websites into a single digital solution.
Discovery
We conducted an initial Discovery phase to uncover the business, technical and user requirements for the new digital platform.
These included:
Including Interflora's internal designers and developers in the delivery of the transformation project to make sure they could own the tech stack once live.
Helping to upskill Interflora's teams on the new technology as it was delivered.
Creating a design system to accelerate future development.
A modern, extensive solution that could deliver content across multiple channels.
While a number of new CMS and DXP platforms and various architectural approaches were evaluated, we determined a cloud-native composable architecture would be the right fit solution for Interflora due to they need for front end freedom and to rapidly adapt digital experiences to any channel or device to deliver omnichannel customer experience.
During the Discovery phase, Candyspace also worked with Interflora's commercial and marketing teams to identify and design a compelling user experience through customer research. This formed the basis of the new design system, which drove visual design consistency and accelerated development time across the new website. Customer insights supported us in making better informed decisions as to the prioritisation of features developed and giving all teams the confidence that we were building the right things for the right reasons.
Solution
We re-platformed and launched three new websites for Interflora in just 9 months. The new composable tech stack included: Commercetools (ecommerce), Amplience (CMS), Algolia (search) and Pimberly (PIM). A mediation layer consolidates data for all platforms together with a new front-end for the websites.
Alongside the launch of the new websites, Candyspace provided consultancy support for internal business change to help the team adapt to the new technologies and the enhanced capabilities and opportunities that the new digital solution would open up.
Results
We launched three new websites in just 9 months. The project, delivered on time and on budget, arming Interflora with a next-generation digital estate and a strong internal capability to evolve the platform. Through leveraging SaaS and cloud-based products, Interflora's IT teams are now about to easily deploy key changes to their websites, their marketing team are empowered to launch and optimise campaigns without the need for developer input, and the highly scalable new websites have an improved ability to cope with increased site load.
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