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Shaun Ryan: [0:02] Hi, I’m Shaun Ryan from SLI Systems and this is the E-Commerce Podcast. Today I’m talking to Ben Harness, the head of online sales for Interflora UK. Hi Ben.

Ben Harness: [0:12] Hi Shaun, how are you doing?

Shaun: [0:13] Good, good, thanks. Now Ben, traditional first question: What was the first thing you ever bought online?

Ben: [0:19] Yeah, I’ve been giving it some thought. Even though it was probably about nine years ago, I believe it was a portable TV from a UK electrical retailer called Comet, and the reason why it was that is because I worked for them at the time.

Shaun: [0:32] Alright, so you’re trying your own website.

Ben: [0:36] Yeah, it was in the days where the staff bought things off of their own website. You could make a significant difference to the weekly says so I think that was the reason why I did it. But yeah, it was a portable television.

Shaun: [0:47] Oh fantastic. So that contributed to you getting your bonus then?

Ben: [0:50] Yeah, exactly. It probably did. [laughs]

Shaun: [0:54] And what was the most recent thing you bought?

Ben: [0:58] The most recent thing I bought was, actually some tickets for a comedy show which I bought off Ticketmaster. So in terms of the most recent product I bought, I do believe it was a CD off play.com, which is a UK retailer.

Shaun: [1:14] Fantastic. Can you give me some background about yourself? How did you get where you are today?

Ben: [1:20] Yeah, my first e-commerce role was with Comet, as I mentioned, in 1999, I joined then. They were actually involved with interactive television when I first started, it was all the rage. I remember all the retailers signed up to it. It was called “Open” at the time and it was by Skye.

[1:43] Now, we had a project with them, and then we decided to actually not go through with it, because I think once we looked into the technology and user experience of digital TV, the retail, especially by satellite, just didn’t seem to work.

[1:59] So that was my introduction into intel. I then took on low key project manager for the Comet website. I rose up there into trading manager for Comet and then I changed and I went to work as the selling manager for marksandspencer.com.

[2:18] And after about three years, at M&S, I joined Interflora where I currently am as head of online sales, about ten months ago.

[2:28] So I’ve done three groups of retail: I’ve done electrical, I’ve done very much clothing, which M&S was, and now I’m in flowers. So quite a broad experience in terms of retail products, all online.

Shaun: [2:41] Yeah, some well-known names there though.

Ben: [2:45] Yeah, yeah.

Shaun: [2:46] And you’re based in the UK? Whereabouts in the UK are you?

Ben: [2:50] Yeah, we’re based in – we’re quite strange actually, we call it the East Midlands. We’re based in Lincolnshire, about an hour from Nottingham is our nearest city.

[3:02] We’re near a town called Grantham, which is famous for Isaac Newton and Margaret Thatcher. That’s it. We’re very much in the sticks, from an economist’s point of view. We’re about two hours from London.

Shaun: [3:14] OK, wow. Tell me about Interflora. I think it’s a well-known brand, everyone knows you sell for less. Tell me a little bit about the company.

Ben: [3:23] Yeah, obviously we sell flowers. It’s a strange set of influences. It’s a very strong brand but ourselves, we’re very much Interflora UK. So Interflora International is very much self-owned in whichever country you’re in.

[3:41] So it’s just the UK business unit. We primarily sell flowers. We do have a small gifting business as well, which we push on the website. We’re owned by a US company called United Online, they bought it last year.

[3:57] They’ve been around for 80 years, since the brand first established itself. But we are very much known as the -and we are – leading flower relay business, first and foremost. The ability for florists to receive flowers in one location, and obviously get them into a different location.

Shaun: [4:19] Right. And how long as Interflora been online, do you know?

Ben: [4:23] Yeah, we’ve got our website since 2001, I do believe. So seven years, eight years.

Shaun: [4:31] Right, OK. So what’s the growth of the company like?

Ben: [4:36] It’s been OK. We aren’t given actual figures. We’re still seeing healthy – we had a good year last year, we still see healthy growth.

[4:48] For the flowers market, particularly, it’s pretty good because it’s pretty competitive. As online businesses go, it’s pretty mature and so a year of growth is good. We had a really strong year, so it continues to please us with the growth we’ve seen.

Shaun: [5:07] How are you achieving that growth? How are you getting customers to your site?

Ben: [5:11] Obviously traffic is absolutely key, and flowers particularly you don’t have to lure customers. It’s gift purchases; it’s not self purchases. So it’s very much, for want of a better phrase, the customers are quite promiscuous. It’s very much about convenience and price.

[5:32] So we do a lot on search engines, we have to be there. We monitor our page search very closely. We put a lot of focus into SEO. And then Webdirect, it’s a direct traffic source, is also pretty important.

[5:49] Although, because of the nature of our business, we don’t really have member florists who push our brand, so we don’t have as much Webdirect traffic as you’d expect.

[6:03] Then we have a sophisticated email base and email campaign. We work with affiliates; we work with partners, so we use all the channels. The usual suspects are our big sources of traffic.

Shaun: [6:16] And obviously, you have some peaks in the year. What are they around?

Ben: [6:22] Yeah, we have a strange… it’s in line with any other retail business I’ve been in. Christmas is the third of our biggest peaks and then Valentine’s and then Mother’s Day which, in the UK, is the 22nd of March, so it’s next week.

[6:35] Mother’s Day is our biggest peak. We obviously have good, strong underlying sales during the year but we do have these three dominant peaks.

[6:47] Yeah, it’s obviously all hands to the pump when it gets to the nitty gritty of those peaks.

Shaun: [6:54] Great. Do you have any issues around those peaks, handling the capacity or the fulfillment?

Ben: [7:02] We’ve got a quite good model for handling the peaks because we have the massive network of florists, so we don’t just have one or two suppliers. We have 1800 florists throughout the UK who cover the areas. So it’s pretty well spread.

[7:21] A lot of our competitors have a central boxed business where it comes out of one supplier, and they’re the guys that have a finite number of slots they can satisfy for a certain peak delivery day.

[7:36] So we do have quite an advantage in the spread of florists that we have. We still have to manage our peaks, because obviously the florists have their walk-in business as well, so we do have to protect the florists. It’s not that bad. We could just be relying on one or two central-fulfilled suppliers.

Shaun: [7:56] Yeah, that’s interesting and is quite a differentiator, isn’t it?

Ben: [8:02] Yeah, it is. We have to leverage that advantage as much as possible and that’s one of our big focuses.

Shaun: [8:09] Right. So what do your biggest opportunities that you have online?

Ben: [8:13] Yeah, I touched on that. Really, it’s the leverage, it’s a tough market, flowers. It’s about convenience, it’s about value and it’s not just about price. It’s about price times quality equals value and that’s very much our outlook.

[8:34] It’s about making sure that we leverage the strength of our florists in terms of the options we offer to people. Because they are local, we do have more flexibility, in terms of what we can do in terms of delivery.

[8:48] We have expert florists, these aren’t anonymous people in a factory somewhere. These are real, pure, product-led people. That is our massive advantage, our real unique selling point, we just need to leverage that more on site and online.

Shaun: [9:04] Right and I mentioned that often your customers won’t see the product themselves. If you’re buying flowers for your mom and she’s in a different town, then your feedback is your mom saying, “Oh, the flowers were lovely.”

Ben: [9:18] Yeah, it’s a strange one. If you have the wrong attitude, you could probably get away with thinking, “Well, the person that buys the product never sees it, so you don’t need to worry about the product quality. It’s not like self-purchase where you’re going to get loads of returns.”

[9:38] But that would be wrong. People do find out. Our florists have a real sort of – they’re people who run a florist’s shop first and foremost, so they have a real good natural focus. And so we try to retain that through how we maintain the website and all our customer propositions and our refunds and returns policy.

[10:03] The purchaser doesn’t really see the products, but we try and make sure that it delivers that real “wow” feeling to the recipient.

Shaun: [10:10] Yup. And I mentioned that if you get good feedback from your mom, you’re going to go back there to do it again, next year.

Ben: [10:17] Absolutely, yes. We talked about customer reviews in our site and obviously it’s been a bit of buzzword for retail sites in the last 18 months. We don’t have customer reviews at the moment, but it’s one thing we are considering and looking at how big an opportunity it is, and how much we think it will at to our conversion first and foremost.

Shaun: [10:41] Yeah and again, it’s slightly different because the people who are going to be reviewing it are, probably going to be the recipients rather than the people that are making the purchase.

Ben: [10:50] Absolutely, yeah. I guess that’s the first debate and the first challenge that you have, exactly that. It’s the recipients and how you capture their details and get the information without being too intrusive.

[11:05] We don’t do it at the moment. We thought about it. There’s a couple of suppliers out there and competitors as well who are… So we’re running customer reviews and just seeing how it looks on the site.

[11:19] Absolutely, it’s about recipients. That’s an advantage to customer reviews, to be honest because even if, maybe, the product that turned up isn’t quite what it looked like on the website, that recipient is still (unless it’s a pretty disastrous experience) happy with what they’ve got. So it does feel like customer reviews is a good place to be.

[11:41] Shaun. Yeah, it could leverage that increased quality control that you have, because you have all these passionate product people putting together these flowers.

Ben: [11:48] Yeah, absolutely.

Shaun: [11:49] So what do you look at for inspiration? Is there an e-commerce site that you particularly admire?

Ben: [11:55] I wouldn’t say there’s…. you might say I would say this, but there’s not really a flowers retailer out there where we think, “Wow, that’s a position to be in.”

[12:09] I’m a bit dull, I think in terms of e-retail, because I very much focus on the service element and the speed of the site and the convenience that the customer gets in being able to buy a product quickly.

[12:22] Play.com here in the UK is a very good site. It’s purchasing process is fantastic. You can be bang, bang, bang – in that site and out again straight away. They very much operate on price competitiveness. That’s not particularly radical, but they’re site functionality and their purchase processing is second to none. I really admire the way those guys do that.

[12:47] Dabs.com, an electrical retailer here, has also led the way in terms of product information, in terms of online chat. I first noticed it when I worked at Comet and now it’s still a very credible website, and always very progressive in terms of how to do things right.

[13:05] Obviously, I’ve got a lot of respect for eBay and Amazon, because they’re still massive year on year on year. They’re probably the most mature e-retailers out there. eBay has a particular model that’s unique – it’s all scale. It’s just fantastic.

[13:22] I think, even though it is a different model to what we are in terms of how people navigate the site, in terms of guided navigation they offer – I think there’s loads to learn from eBay.

[13:32] So yeah, a couple of real specifics there in terms of the way they run their sites. I always keep an eye on eBay and Amazon, just to make sure that we’re not missing out on things that those guys are doing well.

Shaun: [13:45] Yeah, that’s great and it’s good to hear some other examples. So many people I interview always say Amazon, which is fantastic, but it’s good to hear some other examples there as well, so thanks for that.

Ben: [13:57] Yeah, I mean I worked for Amazon when I was at M&S and I do think a lot of their growth is on range in price which is fantastic, but I think more and more you’re going to have to find ways to drive growth other than price. [14:17] Now to be honest those guys did do it in their industry. It seems like prime delivery and their fulfillment is excellent. They’re not just price.

[14:26] In terms of how you navigate around their site, I don’t think it’s amazing, and I think that if they weren’t incredibly as competitive on price, then obviously the growth wouldn’t be there. That’s good and bad when you think about what they do.

Shaun: [14:41] Now tell me, on your site what are you doing that works well for you and what doesn’t work so well?

Ben: [14:52] We don’t have a great purchase process, if I start from the negative. And, as I said I think it’s so important – people concentrate on the sexy parts of a website, but I think if you’ve got someone who wants to give you their money and you make it very difficult then it is an absolute cardinal sin to make that difficult. [15:15] I hold my hands up – our site does not have a great purchasing process so that really is a massive focus for us. That is really, I think, our quick winter.

[15:25] In terms of what we do well, we demonstrate our range and we enable people to get to our products, quickly. We have category navigation that does what it says on the tin. If you want send out delivery, you go to send out delivery. If you want birthdays, you go to birthdays. So it’s a functional and easy site to navigate.

[15:47] Our challenge is making sure we take as much money out of those people who want to shop as possible in terms of making sure we don’t make the purchase process too difficult.

[16:00] We don’t have a particularly complicated site, because we just really do flowers and gifts. We don’t have a wide range to cater for. So we’re fortunate in that sense. We can get a catalogue of navigations to subsets of flowers and so a lot of the navigation challenges that mass merchandisers have, like M&S, we don’t have that.

[16:23] We are just primarily flowers so it’s not the most difficult merchandise I’ve been involved in.

Shaun: [16:30] Right, right. Because you just don’t have those navigational headaches for how to work out what range of products people want to look at in the first place.

Ben: [16:38] Exactly, yeah, we don’t really have massive departments.

Shaun: [16:42] On your purchase process, where you’ve got some problems, I’ve heard from lots of people that it is a great place to look to get some quick ones at a reasonable sort of cost. What type of things are you going to be looking at? What things about it are broken and what do you think you’ll fix?

Ben: [16:56] I’m probably, being a bit harsh. There’s nothing wrong with it in terms of functionality, it just feels longer than it should be. Just from experience, our shop cart is a little too high for my liking. [17:11] We’re really concentrating on using analytics tools to identify the key dropper areas and the key error messages that people are seeing and then put in fixes to A) cut out the source of those error messages. But if we can’t, if they are just errors that customers are noticing, at least making the errors better.

[17:35] It’s very much about getting it shorter, making it much more intuitive, and hopefully cutting down the areas where people have problem. But if people still have problems then for God’s sake at least give them an error message that adds value to the journey and lets them sort themselves out.

[17:54] That’s our real focus. It’s not just subjective; we will use analytics tools and we will use analytics tools to get to the bottom of it.

Shaun: [18:02] Right and some of those things can be very subtle and can make a significant difference. What analytics tools are you using?

Ben: [18:11] We use [inaudible 18:19] Metrics at the moment, that’s one of the biggest guys there. We have a huge focus on our plates on analytics. We really invest a lot of time in squeezing as much information out of it as possible, because I do think that most retailers, particularly use about 15%, 20% of the potential of analytics tools. [18:36] We really are focused in trying to get as much information out of that as possible.

[18:40] We also use a product called Tea Leaf. It’s fairly new to the market and we’ve had that for about three months. We’re just dying to use that in conjunction with analytics to see not only where people are exiting the site, but why. That’s where Tea Leaf really adds the value for us.

Shaun: [19:00] Alright, interesting. I’m familiar with those guys. And you’re using SLI for your search, how are you finding that?

Ben: [19:08] Yeah, good. To be honest, like I said I’ve only been here for 10 months, I think our search was probably… not neglected, but we probably have got a bit of opportunity in search.

[19:22] We work with SLI and the guys here to explain what we want to get out of it. SLI shows great flexibility, in terms of listening to what we want and then giving it a few options as to how we can execute our ideas.

[19:38] We’re trying a gift-finder at Christmas and we’re going to work with the guys going forward to try and find it on the side to help customers with navigation. Yeah, SLI has been really flexible; they’re not just an off-the-shelf package, but try and listen to what we want and try to deliver it, so it’s been great.

Shaun: [19:57] I’m pleased to hear that, that’s great. Now tell me, Ben, how do you keep up with the latest trends in e-commerce?

Ben: [20:06] I am a member of the IMRG here – I don’t remember what it stands for actually. [laughs] I’m a member of the IMRG here. We use econsultancy.com, which I find a very useful website, in terms of regular email updates. I will subscribe to the main magazines here as well and make sure I’m well-read.

[20:28] And you can add value if you attend the right seminars and forums, but obviously there are a lot of those. It’s about picking and choosing the ones that are going to teach you something new.

[20:40] IMRG and econsultancy.com are the first port of call.

Shaun: [20:45] Excellent. And they’re both obviously UK-focused organizations.

Ben: [20:49] They are, yeah. We’re not going to go out and vertically rip up our site and spend millions to change our site. It’s very much about winds and industry developments that we focus on at the moment.

Shaun: [21:06] Excellent. Thanks very much Ben that was great.

Ben: [21:09] Great, cheers Shaun.

Shaun: [21:10] I’m Shaun from SLI Systems for the E-Commerce Podcast. Tune in next time. [audio ends]