Build Your E-Commerce Brand On A Shared Platform

When it comes to being on the forefront of technology, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM is a proven leader. Known to many as an online floral and gift retailer, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM generates nearly $1 billion per year. The retailer was among the first to brand itself around a technology — a 1-800 telephone number. Additionally, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM was one of the first retailers to partner with AOL in the early days of the Internet. So, it should come as no surprise that the retailer currently operates 14 additional brands that sell everything from gift baskets to children's gifts. Duke Marr, VP of e-commerce product management, and Ram Ganesan, VP of IT application development at 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, sought cohesiveness among the retailer's 14 gifting brands to create strong business branding. To do so, the retailer needed to replace multiple, diverse, independent e-commerce systems with one unified technology platform.

Unify Your Brands Behind The Scene
1-800-FLOWERS.COM continues its growth pattern via internal business development and strategic acquisitions. The strategic acquisitions have given 1-800 FLOWERS.COM a broad and diverse portfolio, but they also created a business challenge. To fully realize the benefits of its multibrand strategy, each brand must be unified behind the scenes. However, each new acquisition brought with it a different set of business processes and technology, resulting in a large number of silo operations that were difficult to integrate. When retailers have several different platforms to support, the time to market for new features (e.g. product reviews) is long. This is because the features are not added once to just one system, but rather they are reproduced repeatedly in each platform. "When outlining how to take our business to the next level, we focused on our core competency — gifting," says Marr. "We do not want to be a software development company. Therefore, we took a hard look at our 1-800-FLOWERS.COM platform. It is a very robust homegrown platform, which also includes a few components from IBM. As we acquired these new brands, we found they came with quite a few legacy systems. Also, some of the brands we acquired were more catalog-focused than 1-800-FLOWERS.COM. So, the goal was to tear down the barriers between these brands internally. We are in the process of doing the same thing for our customers starting with The Popcorn Factory (www.thepopcornfactory.com)."

Avoid E-Commerce Platform Duplication
By consolidating systems, the retailer can leverage resources and services across the brands, including IT, shipping, and warehousing information. The first step in consolidation was to provide each individual brand with a common e-commerce platform. Though the 1-800-FLOWERS.COM brand uses its homegrown e-commerce system, Marr and Ganesan realized that using this platform to support all of the other brands was not the best use of the company's resources. Rolling out the 1-800-FLOWERS.COM platform to the other brands would require the retailer to replicate it 14 times. This option was inefficient, and copying the platform numerous times could destroy it.

Indeed, Marr and Ganesan envisioned a platform that would enable the retailer to unify the customer's view of their brands. "Our long-term vision involves the customer having one single cart, one user ID and password, and the ability to shop across all brands and their websites seamlessly," says Ganesan. "We want customer profile data to be shared across all brands and, at some point, share system data [e.g. order confirmation, marketing emails, cross sell, up sell, or promotional information] that is sent to the customer. As we increase the number of brands we have on one platform, we'll achieve payback that much sooner."

Migrate One Brand At A Time To New Platform
In February 2008, Marr and Ganesan researched e-commerce platform vendors as well as SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms. They sought the advice of industry analysts such as Forrester and Gartner before selecting a vendor. The retailer chose IBM WebSphere Commerce for the e-commerce platform in part because it is based on open source technology. WebSphere Commerce, which runs on IBM Power Systems hardware, integrated seamlessly with the company's existing systems. The 1-800-FLOWERS.COM platform remained in place, and most of the other brands will be migrated to the new WebSphere Commerce-based system in the next few years. In the interim, all brands must continue to function independently. To accomplish this, the company is using IBM WebSphere Message Broker and IBM WebSphere MQ, which form an enterprise service bus that ties the legacy systems together. The Popcorn Factory currently runs on IBM WebSphere Commerce. "November and December are the peak business months for The Popcorn Factory, as it generates a significant portion of its business for the year during that time," says Marr. "We chose IBM in February 2008, and by November 2008, IBM had launched the Popcorn Factory's new website and platform."

Since launching The Popcorn Factory on its new platform, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM has seen the Popcorn Factory's conversion rate rise and customer experience feedback improve. The conversion rate metric tracks the number of site visitors who make a purchase. The retailer frequently surveys The Popcorn Factory's customers about the website's ease of use, look and feel, etc. "We have customer councils that regularly shop with us," says Marr. "We question them on everything from how they like the popcorn to the simplicity of the checkout experience. The point of this project is to make the shopping experience easy on the customer."

Marr and Ganesan state the platform's most significant impact will be in the competitiveness it brings to 1-800-FLOWERS.COM by allowing the company to leverage best practices across the entire business. The platform will enable the individual brands to do things they would otherwise not be able to justify, such as incorporating promotional features for each brand.

Using knowledge gained from The Popcorn Factory rollout, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM plans to transition additional brands to the new platform in the next few years. This will facilitate cross selling between brands by unifying the underlying technology. Also, it provides the potential for information sharing across business units, opening up the possibility for more effective marketing to customers.