Allen’s Flower Market

Allen’s Flower Market

About Allens Flower Market

Ben Goldman is the owner of Allens Flower Market, a family business that has been delivering beautiful flowers, plants, and gifts to Long Beach, California, since 1978. The store has four branches in different locations (LONG BEACH, LOS ANGELES, SAN FERNANDO VALLEY, SUNLAND-TUJUNGA) and caters to all kinds of occasions.

Ben loves his customers and always strives to give them the best service possible. However, Ben knows that times are changing, and technology is reshaping the flower industry. He thinks it’s time to pass on the business to his son Harry, who can bring new ideas and innovation to the store.

Harry saw an opportunity to modernize the store by implementing an online ordering system and order management. This would not only improve the client experience, but it would also streamline business operations.

After five years of development, Allens Flower Market debuted its new website, built on Magento 2, with e-commerce capability, loyalty points, coupon codes, and a plugin for free gift cards.

How It Started?

Harry realized the need to innovate the store to keep up with the changing business landscape. He saw an opportunity to expand his business by providing customers with an easy-to-use online system where they could browse and order flowers, plants, and gifts from the comfort of their own homes.

He was of the view that if the store can provide any way of comfort and ease to its target customers, the business will greatly benefit.

After months of research and analysis, he decided to get an online platform developed by experts that would provide exceptional customer service, streamline business operations, and, ultimately, increase revenue.

What was the goal

The goal behind developing Allens Flower Market’s online platform was to provide customers with an easy-to-use platform for browsing and purchasing products. The other purpose was to streamline the business operation during busy hours and season days & increase the revenue. This flower store project had the following key objectives:

  • Enhancing the user experience: The platform needed to be developed with a creative and user-friendly interface, so customers find it easy to order and browse.
  • Online orders: The primary need of the website was to be able to accept orders like the basic ecommerce website performs.
  • Rewards program: The website demanded a reward points feature to attract customers. This feature had a twist as it allows customers to convert every 100 reward points into $1.
  • Providing coupons: They also needed a coupon code function that allows customers to apply coupons & avail of exciting discount offers during festive seasons.
  • Optimizing the delivery process: Needed a delivery flow that automatically determines the hours of delivery & manages all delivery and order queues.

What was our approach?

Understanding the business model was the first step of starting this project. It is also required to understand the market trends, target audience, their behavior towards online platforms and challenges of the store. With months of understanding & analysis, a conclusion for developing the solution was derived. The approach involved the following steps:
  • The first step involved was to understand & analyze the problems that the store was facing. This includes how to manage the delivery flow & the order process efficiently and effectively.
  • Next, was to identify what the customers wanted and expected from the store. This involves getting the products delivered on time & offering a huge variety to choose from.
  • After that it was required to develop a strategy (in terms of selecting the right technology) to solve the problems & satisfy the customers. It required access to things like automation to streamline the order process & adding more products to the store’s inventory.
  • Then implement the chosen technology & development strategy by creating a website using Magento 2. It is a great choice for ecommerce functionality, online ordering, reward points & coupon codes.
  • The final step was to test & optimize the website by allowing a group of people to give feedback regarding how more efficient it can be made to deliver maximum benefit.

What Technologies We've Used

Magento 2 was the primary technology used to develop the website for Allens Flower Market. Magento 2 is a robust and scalable e-commerce platform with many features and functionality.

The following features were used in the development of the website:

  • E-commerce functionality: The website has a fully functional e-commerce platform that allows customers to browse and order products online.
  • Reward point feature: It has a reward point feature where customers can earn points for their purchase and every 100 points can be converted into $1.
  • Coupon code feature: It also owns a coupon code feature that allows customers to get discount benefits by entering the coupon code at checkout page.

Apart from the above functionalities, the next essential technology used was a plugin called MAS Integration, which allows the website to offer gift cards as promotions to its customers.

This plugin integrates with the website’s Magento 2 platform, enabling customers to add gift cards to their cart like any other product. This feature helps the business to attract more customers and increase sales.

Then it required Paypal and MAS POS Integration, which makes it easy for customers to make payments online.

The website uses PayPal as its primary payment gateway and MAS POS as its point-of-sale system. This integration allows the business to accept payments using different payment methods and make the whole payment process more convenient for customers.

Problems Faced During Development

Developing software for Allens Flower Market was full of challenges and intense research. The most difficult challenge was to manage and integrate the delivery flow into the website. This required the development team to carefully calculate delivery hours & only accept orders placed two hours before store closing. The team spent hours making the flow perfectly accurate and easy for the store as well as for the customers. Another challenge was ensuring the website could handle a high volume of traffic without slowing down or crashing. This required the team to optimize the website’s code and implement caching mechanisms to ensure fast loading times for customers. Integrating the MAS Integration plugin with the website was also a significant challenge. The team needed to custom develop a solution to ensure seamless integration. However, even after facing many challenges & time taken to develop the fully feature-rich website, the development team was able to deliver an outstanding website that met all of the business’s needs and surpassed customer expectations.

Addressing the Issues

The development team implemented a custom delivery flow module to address the delivery flow challenge, payment integration, and developing a feature-rich yet beautiful website. It allows for automation & accurately calculates the hours of delivery based on the customer’s location & preferred delivery time. It makes it easy for the store to accept orders and close the store on time to maintain the efficiency of the staff. Website loading time was also a concern, as customers don’t prefer websites that take too much time to load and get things work. Thus, to address this issue the expert developers optimized & revised the website’s code & implemented caching mechanisms that will make the loading much faster. It involved server settings that can distribute the website load and make it lightweight. Lastly, Paypal and MAS plugin were integrated with the website to ensure it is able to accept payment and the data stored is also secure. To ensure all the functionality and features of the website are working properly, they conducted a final testing and evaluation process. This helped them identify the buffs or issues the website might still have.

The Result

Allens Flower Market, an online store was a huge success. Although the development phase took time of 5 years, still the efforts and time is worthy because of the benefits it has offered to the store.

The website now has an efficient delivery flow that can manage huge orders seamlessly without any human efforts. The website’s performance is also improved significantly, with fast loading times even with the integration of heavy plugins.

Overall, the website has helped Allens Flower Market expand its online business and improve its overall customer experience.