Delivering smiles and sparking innovation at 1-800-FLOWERS.COM
This blog, ghostwritten for a client of a major cloud services provider and aimed at a technical audience, introduces a case study about their digital transformation.
As a leading provider of gifts designed to help customers express, connect, and celebrate, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. has embraced cloud technologies to grow and transform our business through constant innovation.
As part of our digital transformation, we recently completed the migration of our e-commerce platform and other services to Major Cloud Provider. We’ve transitioned from a monolithic to a microservices platform, moved many workloads from our on-premises data centers to our new cloud environment, and scaled both horizontally and vertically.
Since our migration, we’ve developed efficient processes to launch new brands, improved the customer experience across all brands, and seen significantly increased site traffic.
Nurturing a more delightful customer journey
Customer delight is at the core of everything we do. Whether it be with a flower bouquet, a sweet treat, or a personalized keepsake, our mission is to deliver smiles.
With the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve all been challenged to find unique and safe ways to continue honoring the special connections in our lives. Our customers have adapted by sending gifts to isolated loved ones, sharing the same meal together virtually or using video to engage with others through group activities like flower arranging.
The customer experience is a top priority for us. We constantly look for innovative ways to enhance the customer journey across our entire platform. As a result, we’ve continued to see a rise in demand as customers enjoy the ease and convenience of our site and discover our full family of over a dozen brands.
Migrating to a cloud-first mindset
As we’ve continued to innovate and iterate on the customer experience, we focused on evolving our platform. We wanted to shift to a microservices platform, which would allow our team to release updates to our site more often and set up the right continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices.
Working with Major Cloud Provider, we moved our e-commerce platform to the cloud and standardized our site and brand deployment by building one release that could then be repeated across all of our brands. We built everything in a modular fashion, including microservices and code libraries, so that sites could be easily constructed and replicated for each brand. With this effort, we were able to launch Shari's Berries quickly after we acquired the brand in 2019.
Moving our platform to a completely homegrown solution of microservices was a daunting task. But our team handled it beautifully through load-testing, stress-testing and building new monitoring tools. And with Major Cloud Provider supporting us all along the way, managing the migration process was simple and easy from start to finish.
Arranging a better bouquet of services
Currently, we’ve migrated every customer-facing touchpoint for all of our brands to Major Cloud Provider—whether it’s on the web or mobile, our AI bots, or our chat interfaces. We now:
Run on Kubernetes Engine and their service mesh.
Have nearly 200 microservices built to help power our entire ecommerce stack across several cloud services running on Major Cloud Provider.
Leverage their major database product for our offline intelligence.
Results are coming up roses
Our new stack on Major Cloud Provider has benefits for both our business and our customers.
We moved from a session-based to a token-based system, which provides enhanced security as well as a consistent, convenient experience across all our brands. Using service workers and a single-page app, we are able to download all the relevant site content to the browser in under two seconds to create an instant-click experience for each and every customer.
We also use analytics to measure our user interactions and provide personalized results to each customer. Our hope is that with this new system, we can learn from customer behavior to offer gift givers a more personalized shopping experience during each visit.
Our new tech stack has helped us enhance the solutions we offer to customers today, and enabled us to offer new ones at lightning speed. With our legacy system, we used to release new code once a week or once a month. Now, even during our peak periods, we’re able to release 10 to 15 times a day and can deploy and pivot quickly to create new microservices and microsites on the fly—often without having to touch any code.
Growing collaborations
The benefits of moving our platform to Major Cloud Provider have extended to our internal teams as well.
Before the migration, we had only two environments for developing and testing, making it time-consuming to test updates before they went into production. Now we have several different journey teams—made up of developers, product owners, and technical owners—all working in several different environments, solving problems and creating new solutions together.
Everyone is now empowered to be self-sufficient, developing and releasing microservices on their own. Our developers have more time now to engage in continued development and learning opportunities.
Planting seeds for future growth
As we think about how we’ll help our customers express, connect and celebrate in the years ahead, we’ll continue to collaborate across teams to deliver solutions that spread smiles. Specifically, we’re exploring additional use of AI to help us better serve our customers across all our brands.
We’ve enjoyed the ongoing support we’ve received from the Major Cloud Provider team as they helped us build new solutions and designed a road map for the future. Their support has proven the power of the cloud and helped us deliver the very best experiences to our customers.
Learn more about 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc.