Tech Talk: Florist Switches Payment Platform

Tech Talk: Florist Switches Payment Platform
By Elizabeth Wasserman
An online fresh-flower seller found that sales increased dramatically after the company deployed a new software-as-a-service secure payment solution that integrated customer relationship management.KaBloom is a Massachusetts-based online florist in business since 1998 that has a patented technique for shipping fresh-cut flowers in water overnight. The company found that sales increased dramatically after switching to a new online payment platform that allowed the firm to better communicate with customers and allowed customers to more easily process payments, CEO David Hartstein tells IncTechnology.com. Elizabeth Wasserman: You have a patented system for sending fresh flowers in water to customers over night. How did that impact your technology decisions? David Hartstein: We've been in business since 1998 and our business has gone through different cycles. Today we have over 30 stores but our business model right now is focused on mainly selling online at KaBloom.com. The majority of our stores are in Massachusetts. We also have stores in Chicago and Florida. But we deliver nationally. Fresh cut flowers that are delivered over night are usually delivered by FedEx without water. When you go through the rigorous distribution and logistics within FedEx, you can not pack flowers in water. Think about taking a bottle of water and putting stems inside. If this ends up on its side or upside down, the water will be all over the place. We have a patented technique where we are the only one in the world that can ship fresh flowers in water via FedEx. Our flowers can be in any position, upside down and sideways, and no water will spill. When we started offering this to customers, we needed a new platform, a new way to communicate with our customer and tell them about what we do, what we have, and why we are different.
Wasserman: What did you decide to do?
Hartstein: We decided to implement a new payment platform called whizPay mainly because it provides reliability and ease of use. It provides a very easy customer checkout process. The back office that we have with it has very rich functions. It assists us with product description, with the content, with our stores and our stores managing platforms. Each store has the ability to manage their orders. It's a central platform that they can access from different locations. They get a notification when an order comes in for them. They have the ability to log in to the main platform, communicate with the customer, change the order, change the address. Without having to have an administrator do it for them.
Wasserman: At the same time, does it protect your data? Hartstein: It's all secure. There is information that can only be managed by the administration and not by each store. They can not delete a customer's information. There are other benefits, too. For example, say we have a store in Virginia. That store knows their customer base and knows what the customer likes. They have the ability to display the designs that their customer likes so that when the customer orders a certain design, the system knows to go to that store to deliver that product. We have the ability to say that product X can only be delivered from Y location.
Wasserman: What it easy to implement? Hartstein: It was easy -- as far as anything in technology is easy. We launched Sept. 1, 2008 and we never had to during that process shut our site down and bring other alternatives online. There are always hiccups but we've never had issues.
Wasserman: What results have you seen?
Hartstein: Since February of this year, we have seen an increase of about 50 percent in orders through the new platform. That is quite astonishing in this market. There are two reasons for this. First, we have a product we sell that no one else sells and that is that we are the only one can deliver flowers in water from coast to coast over night. Second, our management function within our platform allows us to communicate with our customers in a much easier way. var disqus_title="Tech Talk: Florist Switches Payment Platform";var disqus_message = "An online fresh-flower seller found that sales increased dramatically after the company deployed a new software-as-a-service secure payment solution that integrated customer relationship management."; var disqus_url="http://technology.inc.com/internet/articles/200906/tech_talk_hartstein.html"; var disqus_iframe_css = "http://www.inc.com/views/css/disqus.css";Using Twitter to Find Customers
By Minda Zetlin Most businesses think of Twitter as a promotional tool, but it can also be used to find sales leads. Here's how to use Twitter to find potential customers and how to convert those contacts into sales.
Boloco, a burrito restaurant chain with 16 locations often runs ads in a Boston newspaper. The ads contain coupons for the chain’s popular burritos for a special price of $3. It makes sense to advertise in Boston, since 13 of the chain’s 16 restaurants are there, but CEO and co-founder John Pepper wished the ads could also bring customers to Boloco restaurants in New Hampshire and Vermont. So, when he ran one recent ad, Pepper also posted a photo of the coupon on Twitter, inviting diners to bring in any image of the coupon -- a photocopy, printout, or even an image on a mobile phone -- to get the discount. “It was a way to bring people outside Boston in the print advertising, and a way toincrease our visibility,” says Pepper, whose Twitter ID is @boloco. The tactic proved wildly successful, he says. “Usually we get about 350 coupons on that kind of promotion. This time we got 900, including the mobile phones. About 25 percent of our transactions that day came from the coupon, which never happens.” In effect, he says, posting the ad on Twitter decreased cost per reader by increasing circulation. Connecting with customers Most business that use Twitter think of it mostly as a promotional tool, a way to announce new products, perhaps gain readers for a blog. But some smarter companies are actually using Twitter to sell products, such as Dell Corp., which recently acknowledged that it had made $3 million in sales in two years over Twitter, primarily by posting coupon numbers for discounts of 10 percent or more on Dell Outlet items. “There’s no reason not to try Twitter,” notes Stefanie Nelson, marketing manager for Dell, who created Dell Outlet’s Twitter campaign. “There’s no cost, and it’s a limited time commitment, at least it was for me at the beginning. Before we built up the following and reach that we have now, it took me literally minutes a week.” (Things have gotten a bit busier now that @DellOutlet has over 700,000 followers.) According to Nelson, the most important first step is to know exactly what you want your tweets to accomplish. “Understand why you’re on Twitter,” she says. In her case, she adds, the objective was to quickly sell Dell Outlet items, which are usually excess inventory. And, she says, “If you know your objective, and who your target audience is, Twitter can be just as effective for a small company as a large one.”
Boost sales with Tweets Using coupons to create boost sales is only one way to reach customers with tweets. Here are a few others: Give your company a human face. Pepper uses TweetDeck to track mentions of “Boloco” on Twitter, and one day it flagged a tweet in which a woman bemoaned the cool, rainy weather this summer and pondered whether to spend the afternoon at Boloco or a different restaurant. “I’ll respond to that one, with something like, ‘I vote for Boloco!’” he says. Twitter users are usually pleasantly surprised, he adds. “They expect @Boloco to be like @DunkinDonuts. They don’t expect to hear from the head of the company.” There’s a delicate balance between making human contact, and sharing too many everyday details that may not interest your customers, Nelson says, a dilemma she partly addresses by using @StefanieatDell for more personal tweets. Whatever you do, she advises, avoid spamming followers with promotional direct messages not specifically written for them. Find customers when they’re looking for your product or service. Searching Twitter can be a very effective way to find new customers. For instance, Rocky Mountain Ace Stores, an affiliation of Denver area Ace store owners, uses monitter to search Twitter for both keywords and locations of tweeters. One day, the group flagged a Denver man worrying about insects in his lawn. “So we tweeted to him about beneficial insects, such as ladybugs, which will eat bugs all summer, and which we sell,” says Andy Carlson, who owns an Ace store in Denver and is on the group’s board. “He wound up coming in to one of our stores and buying ladybugs.” Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia, a video-sharing site for business use, advises putting some thought into picking the terms you search on Twitter, just as you would for meta tags. “Research the most frequently searched terms in your market on Google and other search engines,” he says. “Then search or monitor those terms on Twitter. Deal with disgruntled customers -- fast. One evening Ace customers posted an angry tweet because a tool he’d bought from a Denver area store broke after one use. “We got in touch, recommended which store he should go to to return the item, and alerted the manager at that store,” Carlson says. “He didn’t know that Ace hand tools all carry a lifetime guarantee.” The man was very impressed, and went from being angry at Ace to being a devoted Ace customer. The complaining tweet came through late at night, Carlson notes, well after the stores were closed. And, he says, it was especially important to intervene quickly. “You don’t know whether he’s going to go back to the store right away, or stew about it for three or four days and tell more people. The more time between the bad experience and the resolution, the more likely he is to tell his friends, so the quicker we can solve a problem, the better.” And that’s the nice thing about Twitter, he says. “You can catch a problem when it happens, and do something about it.” var disqus_title="Using Twitter to Find Customers";var disqus_message = "Most businesses think of Twitter as a promotional tool, but it can also be used to find sales leads. Here's how to use Twitter to find potential customers and how to convert those contacts into sales."; var disqus_url="http://technology.inc.com/internet/articles/200907/twitter.html"; var disqus_iframe_css = "http://www.inc.com/views/css/disqus.css";