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O3 World Launches FruitFlowers.com

In celebration of their 25th year, we recently launched the site for FruitFlowers.com, formerly Incredibly Edible Delights. This project came with a ton of hurdles, forcing us to do our best Edwin Moses to overcome them one at a time. The first of which was working through the business rules of the FruitFlowers franchise and the user interface strategy necessary to cater to their audience, since it is geographically specific. FruitFlowers has franchises in several states, but not all of them, which is hurdle number one, and each franchise has different pricing, which is hurdle number two. In order to cater to this, we needed to take both of these into consideration for users landing on the site, while still ensuring that the purchasing path moved as quickly as possible. The primary solution, which also happens to work well for a historically, quick shopping male audience, was to create a Find FruitFlowers Fast option on the home page, which asks for the destination zip code up front.

Another hurdle to consider was one of the biggest issues with their last site... speed. E-commerce sites in general should be built for speed, so that products load as quickly as possible and the checkout process is as short as possible. But we made sure we went the extra mile to ensure this shopping experience was a sprint, not a marathon. Everything on the site comes up very, very quickly, allowing you to browse or checkout at your own pace… because no matter what that is, the site will accommodate it.

And finally, just when our legs started to cramp and we thought the finish line was close, we dealt with the biggest hurdle, which was to ensure that the site effectively communicated with their new Point of Sale inventory system (we needed a pole to vault us over that hurdle). Both the Point of Sale system and site were being customized and tested simultaneously. And to add to the confusion, the Point of Sale provider was in Canada. While most consumers cannot see this happening behind the site, it is the most important piece of the development process, and the most critical piece to the FruitFlowers business process.

While the site has just launched only a week ago, we are expecting a lot more carved up fresh fruit to be ordered through the site than ever before. Although, we’ll make sure to write a follow up post a few months from now to discuss, one way or another. In the meantime, it’s graduation time... so go Find FruitFlowers Fast for your favorite grad!