For those of you who aren’t aware (i.e. those of you who buy your flowers from a gas station), eFlorist (formerly known as Teleflorist) is the largest florist membership network in the UK, with around 1800 florists in England, Scotland and Ireland; as well as international delivery to almost 140 countries worldwide.
Hence on May 25th 2010, eFlorist was bought by Euroflorist. The Swedish company are Europe’s largest florist member relay network and were the first company in Europe to sell flowers over the internet. This merger was partially thanks to the new sales order processing system that we developed for eFlorist, which continues to perform seamlessly and increase customer and member loyalty.
So where does this lead us? Well currently we are deploying the system to fourteen different European countries; which sounds a lot easier than it actually is: each country has its own specific business logic around transactions and functionality. Plus some countries don’t have post codes or equivalent data (such as Ireland), our solution is to build on top of the existing scalable platform developing modular components for ‘internationalisation’. This will allow translated versions of the system to run in specific territories and to deal with the time zone differences for that region. Currently the eFlorist.net system supports over 1800 member florist organisations, transacting and routing sales orders in real-time; with this in mind we designed the eFlorist platform with scalability and resilience in mind. So the increased load of extra users from additional countries won’t be so much of a challenge. Plus we also monitor the ‘private cloud’ of servers that host and manage eFlorist on a 24×7 basis, and are able to optimise, tune and deploy new server hardware to cope with additional processing requirements, pro actively.
As techies who deliver real business solutions; we’ve been really impressed with the resilience, and availability of this business critical system. We believe that the management at eFlorist have invested wisely at the beginning of the project; to provide for a development budget, ensuring maximum uptime and availability of the system. Whilst we had a few niggles upon going live, (lasting less than 2 weeks but hairy all the same!) the system hasn’t missed a beat since.
Unfortunately eFlorist is a closed system, so unless you’re a member florist you won’t get to use it – however if you’d like more information, you can read the case study in our portfolio. Or if you’d just like to order some flowers then you can buy online from eFlorist or Euroflorist directly.