Will has been busy as a regular contributor to econsultancy’s blog as well as others, so we thought we’d share some of his posts here too.

Having a growing online business can be filled with thousands of individual decisions, each of which in sum can lead to the shape of your business.  We thought we’d summarise some of them here as a guide for anyone making similar decisions.  Enjoy.

Tips for boot strapped startups (try saying that after two pints)

In his post, Six top tips for bootstrapped startups, Will shares his advice about what to expect when starting a new company without piles of VC backing behind you.

1. Employing friends and family at the start of a new company is a good way to get people who believe in you on board – but make sure the relationship can survive the stress.

2. Take the lead, the buck stops with you. Management by committee can lead to poor compromised decisions.

3. Don’t wing it or make rushed decisions. Tell your team exactly what you need to make a decision (data, costs, where assumptions are) then they will come prepared when seeking approval (and more likely to get a “yes”).

4. Don’t let minority investors run the game; this can slow down progress when small share holders dig their heels in because of different expectations.  It’s your business, so make sure you can run it your way.

5. Patience isn’t a virtue, it’s a necessity.   Will gives a rule of thumb that “raise twice as much as you think you need and expect it to take twice as long”.

6. Know your end game. And keep it in mind the whole way along.  There are many reasons to start a business, but once you’re immersed in the detail and the hard slog, don’t forget your reasons and make sure the ship keeps moving in the right direction.

Nothing is normal

If you’re just at the early days of starting your business and feel like your life is a bit all over the place, it’s normal.  Feeling like you’ve done nothing for a week then completely manic the next week, it’s normal.  In Will’s post for Management Today, My Week: Will Wynne of ArenaFlowers, he describes how a day can involve going to meet with a courier company, or getting two hours sleep, or not having lunch, or flying to the US to check out how they do things out there.

Sit in big chair, stroke cat, ponder world domination

In one of Will’s post for econsultancy, he looked at issues regarding international expansion of an online business.  This can be an attractive prospect for business owners – you may have found that you get a lot of traffic from non-UK audiences, or that your product might be attractive for those outside of your current target country.

This is not an insignificant decision to expand your business internationally and there are some tools which can help you work out if or where markets for your products exist.  Will comments in the telegraph on Google’s new export research tool here. Called Global Market Finder, this tool from Google allows you to look at search terms and competition in new countries.  This might give you some ideas if there is demand for your product, or what people are looking for in your particular field.  For example, Marmite appears to be a popular search term in China, as is Marmalade in France.

Will also writes about the potential complications around websites, language, SEO and tax.  Once you determine that there is a market, how you get into that market is a plethora of details.  Will gives you 3 top things to consider in his post International e-commerce: three things to consider.

The first is how you show your content to your new audience.  Targeted, local websites?  Or using your main domain?  There are pros and cons to both; you need it to decide which are most important to you.  Having a local website gives a better customer experience, but takes more resource to build and may be harder to get integrated into your backend systems.  Having localised content on your main website maybe a good way to test the market before you invest in a new site.

Do you need to create a locally registered company?  No, it’s not a legal requirement within Europe (although it can help massively when negotiating with local suppliers.  Again, it’s worth weighing the benefits of a local company against the set up.  Creating one does lead to more admin and accounting costs.

VAT, under the distance selling rules for the EU, are charged at the local VAT rate of the goods-receiving country.  Up to a certain threshold.  And this threshold changes from country to country.  For example, once a UK company has sent 35K Euros of goods to Belgium, the company then has to register for VAT in Belgium and pay the Belgian tax to the local tax office (not the UK one).  Variable tax rates on products can create a development issue too, because different tax rates will need to be applied to products depending on which country they are to be sent.

Socially acceptable marketing

You have things up and running, plans of global domination simmering gently on the stove.  So what’s all this social media marketing malarkey?  Ok, that’s a bit patronising, if you’ve come here to a blog from a twitter link or a facebook post, you probably know.  But knowing how to use it for marketing is not necessarily so straightforward.  We hear a lot of examples from big brands with big bank accounts and what they do with social marketing, but how about young companies decide to use the space is trickier.   Will’s blog post on econsultancy “How should a young company approach social media marketing?” gives insight into our experiences of using social media.  Things that have worked long term (like our twitter application, Flowers and Fun) , things that have some success at key times (our Facebook valentine’s wishes page), and things that we could have done without (our world cup flowers video).

Will gives 6 points of sage advice:

1. Make the idea simple. It should be easy for people to pick up – but then also easy for you to put down if it falls flat.

2. Be realistic. Converting sales from social media campaign may disappoint you, but focus more on getting your name out.

3. Make it non-commercial. People don’t want to be marketed at, they want to be entertained.  If your marketing message is obviously selling something, people are less likely to engage, in our experience.

4. Don’t hashtag spam. There are plenty of examples of this going wrong (Habitat being the first example, although they’ve since gone into administration – not due to the hashtag spam, though!)

5. Have fun with it (if you post robotically, people won’t be very inclined to read it or respond)

6. Track what you can (traffic, use referral tags)

Staying on the right side of right

You may be on the right side of your customers – but are you on the right side of the law?  The Advertising Standards Agency released a new extension to its remit in March 2011, which includes content on websites, twitter feeds and Facebook walls.   There are some grey areas which we identified in the new remit and Will’s blog post on the new ASA online regulations, gave some examples of where companies had gone wron and some of the trickier issues.  We thought we’d summarise some of the grey areas and how to avoid getting an ASA complaint upheld:

1.  It’s all about context: Editorial content on a website is not within the remit.  Unless it’s used for marketing purposes.  The example Will gives is the Tanning Shop using a Daily Mail article about tanning being good for you in one of their marketing emails.  Complaints were upheld because although the article was published by the Daily Mail, that wasn’t enough for the Tanning Shop to substantiate the claims.  Similar with customer reviews.  You can’t control what people post on your wall, or how they review products on your website.  But you are responsible if you use those reviews for marketing purposes.

2. Familiarise yourself, your marketing team, your content team and your design team with the new regulations.

3. Respond if the ASA contact you.  From what we’ve read about complaints, the ASA don’t take kindly if you do not respond and you are very likely to have a complain upheld.

4. Be cautious on social media.  If you retweet a tweet from your company which has erroneous information about your company or products, that could lead to an upheld complaint.

5. Question any agency you use to write content about you to make sure they know the new regulations.  Put processes in place so that claims the write about you can be substantiated.  This means more editorial time.

There we go. Quite a few tips all in all! Hopefully helpful / of interest.

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A few weeks back, around the time of the World Cup, we (Flower HQ’s three marketing execs) thought we would have a shot at creating a fun short video, in the hope that it might get a few views on YouTube and drive some brand awareness.  That was the idea anyway. We also knew there was a good chance it would only get a few views, given how much other World Cup related content was going around at the same time.

If you have not yet seen it, have a watch here: Flowers’ World Cup.

Whilst it was fun to make and it came out (we think) pretty well, there are definitely things we’d do differently if we were to do another.  We thought we’d share some of these with you, to help if you ever make a stop motion video.

Tips:

• Creativity: Think of great new ideas, people like watching new things.  This is not only the most important – and perhaps obvious tip – but definitely the hardest.  If you can’t think of something creative and new, then do what’s been done before but add new elements and do it really, really well. Our idea (showing our flowers competing against garage flowers in a game wasn’t super original but hadn’t been done before).
  

• Plan: Make a feasible plan & write all of your thoughts and ideas down.  This should include the original point of doing it – you should keep referring back to this to make sure you’re staying on track.

• Location: Select an appropriate location to shot the video.  The environment around you will affect the quality of the video. This includes lighting, setting – for example, whether you are likely to be interrupted by passing traffic or noise.
  

• Time: Take reasonable time to make a video as couple hours will not suffice.  It’s really easy to underestimate the amount of time it will take.

• Target: Do your research and select the audience you want to target.
  

• Be entertaining: Keep it short and interesting.  If you want the world to watch your video, you will need to make it as entertaining as possible and not bore people.

• Sound: Chose a suitable audio track that you wish to add on your video.  Make sure it’s a high quality audio track.  Most audio tracks require a license to use them – some sites to get royalty-free audio are: istockphoto, royaltyfreemusic.  We had quite a debate about the raucous music on our video.

• Commit to finishing it: Don’t give up and stay focused.   Many obstacles will hinder you (I’ll give some examples of what went wrong for us), your motivation might drop, but remember there’s always a great sense of achievement making something, so keep going…

• Distribution: This can be one of the hardest aspects to making a successful video.  There are plenty of different video hosting channels out there; YouTube, Dailymotion, Vzaar and Squidoo to name a few.  Its important to get as much visibility as possible, so you might also want to consider relevant forums and social networking sites.  The more outlets you showcase your video the higher the chance that the video will gain traction and views.

• Go for it: Once you’ve taken the time to make your video – it may not be what you had initially expected, but put it out there anyway.

How & what we did wrong:

Just so that you know we are talking from some experience, we thought it’d be fun to give you some examples of things not going entirely to plan.

Planning:

Finding creativity wasn’t really our problem.  In fact we were so excited to get started, we drew up a plan on the white board in the meeting room.

Once the plan was finished and we ready to get it approved and start making it, we realised, that the drawing was not organized well!  On top of that we couldn’t save it and so we resorted to taking photos of it.

Location:

Selecting the right location is important and we found this out the hard way.  Although our studio is perfect for shooting product images, it didn’t work so well for shooting our video.  The main reason was the heat.  With temperatures rising above 30 degrees in peak summer time, it made it quite hard to work efficiently.  So hot, in fact, that while we were shooting we managed to overheat one of the lamps and blow the mother boards inside.  All we heard was a snap, crackle and pop followed by a puff of smoke and that was the end of shooting for the day (and week).

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Props:

Some of the more keen eyed of you might have noticed we used six beautiful Sunset Cubes to act as a crowd for our game of football.  However after the light melting episode we had to postpone the filming until after the lights had been fixed.

Unfortunately, due to flowers being perishable and our desire to have them looking their best, we had to change the flowers for the second part of the filming.

Distribution:

We did not spend enough time getting our video out there.  We spent almost all our time and energy on getting the video finished before the ever shortening deadline of the World Cup Final as we wanted it to be relevant to current affairs.  What this meant was that once it was done we all sort of sat back relieved that it had been finished, this was a mistake.  We didn’t push the distribution any where nearly hard enough, and of course the video’s views suffered.  We should have spent more time thinking about how we would get our video out there and onto people’s screens.  We assumed that once the video was made we would post it and watch the views fly in, this doesn’t happen in reality.  In hindsight we should have taken time to build a more structured method of where and who we were going to distribute to.  In future productions this will be a very high priority.

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We had great fun making the video and it was a massive learning experience for us three.  The next time that we attempt something like this we will go into it expecting every thing that could go wrong to go wrong, and be prepared this time :)

Here is the vid again – enjoy!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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Yesterday was a busy day for anti-fraud newsflow plus some good old fashioned web fear mongering.  Don’t get me wrong – web fraud happens and needs to be combated but there is often something shrill and hysterical about the reporting of online fraud, especially in the UK.  “Everyone PANIC!” would seem to summarise the editorial style of quite a few media channels.  Before people lock up their PCs or throw them in the river, they should remember that they are significantly more likely to be a victim of crime and fraud when venturing into the real world than they are when venturing online.

There’s no doubt that education is key in battling web spam and other forms of online fraud and Get Safe Online in particular does a fantastic job of putting out clear, moderate and easy to understand information on how to take care of oneself online.  Common sense recommendations include running regular updates for your browser and operating system, having up to date antivirus, antispyware and firewall software and not responding to unsolicited emails or giving away key personal and account information online.  Often, sites like Get Safe Online recommend third party software vendors, such as AVG or McAffee.

Understandably, reputable online businesses recognise the challenge of building trust and at Arena we work very hard to address potential trust concerns of visitors, such as payment methods and checkout integrity, site security, quality / value / freshness of product, and data protection and privacy policies.  After all, if we’re asking customers to hand over their money without ever having met us face to face, then they will need to be convinced that we are who we say we are and that we’ll deliver on our promises.  We try as much as we can to be clear and transparent about what we do (posting to our blog regularly is part of that…I hope it’s clear that this post isn’t being written by a scammer in Eastern Europe!).  The key is not to slip up as, as they say, “trust is hard to win and very easy to lose”.  Once you have it, do your very best to hold on to it.

It’s therefore incredibly frustrating when a lot of hard work is potentially undone by a company that really should know better – MessageLabs (who were, incidentally, purchased for a whopping $700m by Symantec yesterday).  To explain, last week we sent out one of our regular marketing emails to our subscriber base.  So far so good.  But soon after the send, we started receiving emails from concerned customers.  They had received the following email from their mail client, Message Labs:

Subject: WARNING. Someone tried to send you a potential virus or unauthorised code

Body of email included the following: The MessageLabs Email Security System discovered a possible virus or unauthorised code (such as a Trojan) in an email sent to you.

Possible MalWare ‘Exploit/Phishing-paypal-1054′ found in ’7782603_2X_PM3_EMQ_MH__message.htm’. Heuristics score: 202

Now, I don’t know what you think, but if I received an email like that from my firewall supplier, I’d look very hard at any future communications from Arena and quite possibly unsubscribe immediately. After all, MessageLabs are a $700m company so they must be right, yeah?  Surely, they wouldn’t send out an email that slams a genuine business’s legitimate, opt-in marketing activity so thunderously by mistake?  Big boys like MessageLabs are bound to have complicated checks and balances in place to avoid accidentally torpedoing the legitimate marketing efforts of other organisations.  A web security firm in particular would understand the importance of online reputation and the hard work that goes into building trust.  And in any case, Arena has been sending regular marketing emails every other week for over two years, so no doubt MessageLabs would be able to use characteristics of our mail sends, such as previous send frequency, an unchanged IP address, subject lines etc etc to double check the validity of the send.

Nope.  It was a complete, 100% misdiagnosis by MessageLabs, as they subsequently confirmed.  We learnt that the reason that our email got hammered is that we put the word “PayPal” into the subject line yet we are not PayPal.  Blimey.  Sophisticated stuff.  We had PayPal in our subject line to let our customers know that they could win £10k cash if they paid for any order with PayPal during PayPal’s very generous 10th birthday promotion.

Obviously, customers of large online companies and banks, such as PayPal, can be targeted by spoof emails. However, our marketing email prior to this email also had PayPal in the subject line and email body and there was no backlash.  Also, I find it hard to understand how the word PayPal appearing in our mail can lead someone to imply we’re sending “viruses or unauthorised code”.  A virus would typically be an attachment of some kind, not a word in a subject line. I feel bad for PayPal too – we get way way more fraud from people who pay with credit cards than we do from people who pay with PayPal.  Fraud on orders paid with PayPal is virtually nil.  We much prefer people to pay with PayPal.

One of the first emails we received was in fact from a MessageLabs sales rep (who’d previously bought from Arena and who’d therefore received the MessageLabs warning email direct). His mail:

Please remove me from all your mailing list right away as you are sending viruses.
I can assist you with possible solutions however I was unable to reach your IT department.
MessageLabs Anti-virus solution has a SLA of 100% protection from all known and unknown viruses, phishing, trojans and other forms of malware.

http://www.messagelabs.co.uk/products/

Thank you

10/10 for being a pushy sales rep but frankly this mail was not terribly well received as you can imagine.  You wouldn’t want this guy consoling you if you broke up with your partner. “I’m afraid you’ve been dumped but I’m a pimp – have you considered paying for sex?”.  You’d then be even more upset when you found out that it was this guy that had caused the break up with your partner in the first place.

We also noted that, unlike the careful wording of the automated email sent by MessageLabs’ system, his email did not talk about “possible” viruses but came straight out and said “you are sending viruses” which was patently untrue. A rather terse email exchange followed, as you might expect, though not litigation as might have been the case with our American cousins (we’re too British for that).

In any case, I eventually spoke to the UK’s head of corporate sales who unsurprisingly was more reasonable and sort of / nearly / just about apologetic (although he too did suggest we bought their software, admittedly more tongue in cheek that his sales chasing colleague).  He gave me some spiel about how great MessageLabs is and how they use  complicated predictive algorithms to filter mail which all sounded good but didn’t stand up very well to “very nice, but it was just the word PayPal in the subject line that triggered this mess and you misdiagnosed it as a virus anyway”.

The frustrating thing about this is that MessageLabs has several million installed users in the UK, particularly in big, wealthy organisations, such as the government and banks etc.  These are obviously valuable potential customers and exactly the kind of people we’d love to retain.  Unfortunately we have no way of knowing how many such customers have now had their hard won trust in Arena dented or destroyed by MessageLabs’ misdiagnosis and there is no real way for us to fix this (bar writing this cathartic blog post!).  The chap at MessageLabs said “Sorry” but it’s not going to make any difference.  It’s clearly no coincidence that this email performed far worse than any other we’ve ever sent; it can realistically only be down to our MessageLabs mishap.

Maybe to add insult to injury MessageLabs will read this post and then use some of their freshly coined $700m to blast us right off the face of the earth and have done with it.  Ah well, you live and learn.  They didn’t do it on purpose but it certainly hurt.  I guess no matter how careful you are, there will always factors beyond your control, coming from any and all directions, that might disrupt your business.  The best laid plans of mice and men and all that…

Update: Following the post, we were featured on Mail on Sunday and other popular news channels. Read Mail on Sunday’s article on Arena Flowers here. The Register, one of the UK’s leading technology publishers picked up on our concerns and featured an article about Arena Flowers here. The article also featured on Softpedia, a leading technology related online publisher. Read the article on Arena Flowers here.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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Question: What should you expect from a blog post on a flowers blog on a flowers website?

Answer: A post about blog libel, of course!

Why?!: Arena started blogging about a year ago (to understand why we blog, please see this post). One of the great things about blogging is that it’s a two way communication process; we’ve learnt a lot from our readers in the last 12 months.

For instance, take Sarah – a ridiculously well-qualified legal eagle. On learning that Arena had started blogging, Sarah very kindly sent us her legal firm’s top tips on how to blog “safely”. Whilst we’re pretty uncontroversial in our blogging topics, generally liking to talk about flowers and gifts and sometimes web-related things or ethics, we found the guidance very interesting reading. We then thought our more webby readers might also find this of interest. Sarah happily said we could publish it, on condition that we anonymised it (to spare her inbox).

In blogging, there are some risks, but they’re easily manageable with a few simple rules. If you don’t know the rules, you could cause yourself significant trouble, as demonstrated by this recent (and admittedly plain stupid) example of blog self-destruction. So what are those rules…

GIGANTIC FLASHING DISCLAIMER – WE AREN’T LAWYERS SO DON’T RELY ON THIS INFORMATION. SEEK YOUR OWN LEGAL ADVICE!

Our Top 3 Tips
1. The difference – Slander vs Libel - simply, slander is spoken defamation and libel is written defamation. Simple. But, to complicate matters, slander and libel can both be described as verbal (as they both use words) but only slander can be described as oral (spoken) or aural
(heard), as slander involves the defamation being said out loud. Confused? So were we!
2. A blog isn’t exempted from the real world - just because a blog is, well, a blog and all webby and modern and stuff, it doesn’t mean that all of sudden the rules governing the rest of the world have suddenly been thrown away and we can write what we want. We can’t. The rules on defamation apply to blogs just as they do to all other media, be the author a business or an individual.
3. Comments – TOP TIP – Moderation method is surprisingly key - This is a tricky one. Comments on blogs can be administered by the blog “owner” in one of two ways.

1. “We never moderate, – all comments go up automatically.”

Or (the more common approach):

2. “All comments are read and manually approved”

In case 2, comments are manually reviewed to ensure that comments are genuine and not irrelevant “spam” comments).

The latter approach gives a better quality of comments BUT also brings with it a potential legal danger.

If:

• a comment has been reviewed and published by the blog owner;

• that comment is subsequently found to be slanderous; then

• it is the blog owner who is liable not the original author of the comment.

If there had been no “moderation” or “approval” of the comment, and the comment had simply appeared automatically, the blog owner would not be liable. A good analogy is a newspaper. If a newspaper knowingly publishes a slanderous article by a journalist, it’s not the journalist who gets hit, but the newspaper (fair enough). Same for blogging.

So, if you manually approve comments on your blog, then please bear the above in mind. So that’s our top 3 tips done.

Now, for the detail. The following is, word for word, the UK briefing note from a top tier UK legal firm, shared with us by Sarah. So, whilst you shouldn’t rely on this advice, it’s a good guide.

———

Client Briefing August 2007

Libel Law Checklist

The critical elements of libel law are that the statement is defamatory and that it has been published and that it identifies the claimant. The claimant has to prove its case on the balance of probabilities.

• A statement is defamatory if it lowers a person in the estimation of the right thinking members of society;
• A statement is published if it is communicated in writing to one or more persons; and
• A statement identifies the claimant if it refers to him or her. Generally, the claimant will be named and the issue will not arise but an unnamed but identifiable claimant will be able to sue. [Will: see a famous recent UK example of this exception here.]

In conclusion, the burden of proof on the claimant can be conveniently divided into three elements:

1. The defamatory statement: do the words convey a defamatory meaning?
2. Publications by the defendant: if the answer to (1) is yes, has the defendant published or been responsible for the publication of the defamatory statement?
3. Reference to the claimant: if the answers to (1) and (2) are yes, would the defamatory statement be reasonably understood to refer to the claimant?

Even if the claimant succeeds under each head and establishes a claim in defamation, this does not necessarily mean that he will win the case. It then falls to the defendant to establish one or more of the available defences. The most common defences are justification, fair comment and privilege.

Justification

A defendant “justifies” when he contends that the defamatory statement is true or substantially true. It is only necessary for a Defendant to prove that the “sting of libel” is true, not every detail.

Fair Comment

A Defendant must overcome four hurdles in order to establish this defence:

1. The statement must be comment and not fact.
2. The comment must be based on facts that are themselves true.
3. The comment must be one that a “fair-minded” man could honestly hold.
4. The subject matter of the comment must be of public interest.

Absolute Privilege

Absolute privilege is a complete defence. The law recognises that public interest may require that a person should be protected from liability in some circumstances for a statement which is defamatory even though the words cannot be proved to be true or defended as Fair Comment. Absolute privilege applies to limited situations only, such as statements made in the course of parliamentary or judicial proceedings , or contemporaneous and accurate reports of such proceedings.

Qualified Privilege

The exact boundaries of this defence are uncertain. Qualified privilege may arise in relation to a statement made by a person in pursuance of a legal, social or moral duty to a person who has a corresponding duty or interest to receive it (for example, a prospective employer who is seeking a reference from a former employer), for the protection of a legitimate interest or fair and accurate reports of judicial proceedings.

——-

Okay, so I’ll admit that it’s hardly a page turner like the Da Vinci Code and this post is unlikely to threaten the Harry Potter series in the popularity stakes, but, personally, I’m very glad I now know where I stand and what to avoid. For example, the implications of the comments reviewing thing caused me to double check the comments on a post from a while back, about some trouble Interflora had.

Hopefully this was helpful. Thanks again to Sarah for her help. We really appreciate it and we welcome feedback and comments from all our customers and visitors.

Now, for those feeling dangerously under supplied with flower pictures, here is my favourite Arena bouquet (again) – it is stunning and every time I see one I simply have to stop to take it in.

Back to flowers next week!

REMINDER OF GIGANTIC FLASHING DISCLAIMER – WE AREN’T LAWYERS SO DON’T RELY ON THIS INFORMATION. SEEK YOUR OWN LEGAL ADVICE!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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Answer? It was taken at 0410 in Harwich ferry port, on the East coast of the UK when Ronald and myself should have been sound asleep in our beds in Noordwijkerhout, NL and London, UK respectively.

Why? A consignment of box lids that was due to come over during Mother’s Day week didn’t materialise and we were going to run out. Given half our orders go out in boxes, to run out of lids during a peak period like Mother’s Day would have been nothing short of a disaster. So Ronald picked up a consignment, jumped in his van and hot footed it to The Hook of Holland, making it just in time to catch the last ferry.

Hooray! I was the lucky one that got the task of driving the 90 miles to the coast to meet him. So, having gone to bed at 11pm I was then back up again at 0215 (with the aid of no less than 6 alarms to wake me!), in the slightly surreal position of driving through late night London revellers, rubbing sleep from my eyes. I made it to Harwich at 0400 to find a virtually deserted port.

Trouble at the border: As I waited for Ronald, I was informed that, even though the port was nearly empty, my van would be destroyed if I didn’t park it in the car park. Rather than pay £2.50 to park for five minutes, I just drove round and round the roundabout instead. This seemed to infuriate the security guard for some reason – perhaps he has shares in the car park company. I decided it wouldn’t be wise to wave at him each time I went round the roundabout. Ronald was with me five minutes later, customs and excise having taken a keen interest in the contents of his van and carried out a thorough search – flowers aren’t the only plants that the Dutch have a reputation for cultivating so I guess the search was no surprise.

Success! With a clean bill of health for Ronald and with my van having survived the officious security guard’s attentions, we loaded up the box lids and headed our separate ways – Ronald back onto the ferry, me in the fast lane to Flowers HQ. I got to our offices at 0555 and 5 minutes later a truck, which had left our warehouse in Holland with a four hour head start on Ronald, pulled in, laden with a bumper load of Mother’s Day flowers. I was very relieved!

Note to self: make sure we have box lids organised well in advance in future!

PS we’re very proud of our boxes…they’re double laminated so they’re super strong – so much so that, as you can see, a grown man (Joseph in this case) can stand on them (so can I and I weigh 85kg).

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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Hot on the heels of Jackie’s post last week about a customer suing his regular florist for the princely sum of £750k (for revealing his infidelities), today we read this headline: “Interflora website ‘rips off’ customers“. For an industry that brings happiness and joy, love and best wishes, it’s certainly been a grim seven days for certain players in the world of flower delivery. On the other hand, if true, it sounds like Interflora may have been pretty idiotic in their (alleged!) behaviour and the way they’ve (allegedly!) treated their customers so we shouldn’t have too much sympathy for them. The customer is king and should be treated like royalty. Businesses only have themselves to blame if they forget that.

We’re currently rebuilding our checkout, to allow returning customers to pass through the site more quickly and efficiently. How? Well, the key thing is not having to re-enter the same information each time you visit. Eg all your previous addresses and delivery instructions will soon be available with a single click in check out. I’ve seen it working on our development server and it’s very cool. More importantly, it’s intuitive, easy and quick.

Another idea relates to taking regular payments from customers. This is potentially a gigantic can of worms (as Interflora has found out) and something we are approaching with extreme caution. We’re taking lots of advice from the payments experts at PayPal on this front so we work out exactly how to do things before we even think about building something. A customer’s trust is hugely valuable – it’s hard to win, very easy to lose and almost impossible to win back. Trust is one area that we hope we never, ever mess up and we go to great lengths to avoid even the possibility of any problems.

We’ve got some other cool ideas but if we told you what they were, we’d have to kill you! While Interflora might be busy beating off the unwelcome attentions of the Financial Services Authority and the Office of Fair Trade, we still don’t want to give them, or anyone else, a head start on our new ideas. You’ll just have to come back to the site over the next few weeks, try the checkout and see if it’s changed. If it hasn’t, well just buy your partner that dozen red roses bouquet anyway! :)

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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Being an online retailer is not easy, especially when it’s such an interconnected world where making the right connections is the key to achieving objectives. At Arena Flowers we mull over the different online advertising channels every day, reviewing their promises to dramatically boost our visitors overnight. It would be easy if we had very few channels to choose from. But the deluge of online advertising media puts businesses like ours in a tricky situation. To complicate this, there is no proven formula to identify what works best and what doesn’t. One thing that works for sure is the ‘holy grail’ of online businesses – Google organic search.

While optimising for Google remains our primary concern to maximise our reach to flower lovers and, consequently, our flower sales, we constantly seek other avenues to promote our online presence. This is to ensure that we don’t lag in a competitive industry. But what are the alternatives to the Google monster?

There are many online businesses offering advertising and promotional opportunities. There is a barrage of online advertising channels, affiliate programmes, shopping comparison sites, directories and even social networking sites which claim to be able to augment our online flower presence. One leader of the pack chasing Google is internet auction site, eBay, one of the most popular forms of internet advertising for online businesses like Arena Flowers.

Historically, eBay auctions have been seen as a prominent and a popular channel to reach out to customers. Many companies have based their business models entirely on eBay and succeeded. We too are keen to capitalise on this, although selling our products on eBay has not been an easy choice. We had discouraging results from our initial cost benefit analysis, and had to make some fairly optimistic assumptions about conversion rates. Also, eBay is not a natural place for people to go looking for flowers.

But have you heard of heart ruling over head? So powerful is the eBay machine and the millions of page views that it generates every hour, that we decided to try listing our products anyway. We felt that, despite the negatives, listing our flowers on eBay stood a good chance of giving us some benefit either in terms of branding or in terms or our search marketing efforts.

We listed our flowers in the shop format and the auction format. We even listed one of our bouquets as “Featured Plus” in order to bump the flowers to the top of the category. We trialled our eBay flower shop and bought a couple of products ourselves, to test. Finally, on the 1st July 2007, we listed around 14 flower bouquets. Immediately after our launch, we sold a white gift wrap, which encouraged us to add in more bouquets, to give a fuller range. Fifteen days after our first flower sale, we are still waiting for the next one.

:(

In summary as it stands now:

• No. of bouquets Listed: 20
• No. of sales since our first sale: 0
• Amount Spent for listing on eBay: Quite a bit

Nevertheless, we did have some positives. We experimented using video in our listing to promote our products, courtesy vzaar, a cool new tool developed by a team of creative wizards, which aims to improve the eBay marketplace by making it easy to add video to listings. Into the bargain, we ended up being blogged about. We also had Google pick our listings and even our Arena Flowers blog on eBay (basically, the same as this one so no need to rush off and read that one too).

To conclude, in terms of SEO we’re getting some benefits, in terms of sales, it’s not working out just yet. It’s still early days, so we’ll be patient. Watch this space!

PS: If you want to buy from us on eBay (we have 100% positive feedback!), rather than through the best flower site in the world!, here are some of our listings:

• A Dozen Red Roses
• Pink Gift Wrap
• Tulip Sensation
• Pink Lilies & Roses
• White Gift Wrap
• White Lily Bouquet
• Red Carnations
• Mixed Carnations
• Freesias Bouquet
• Gerbera Bouquet
• A Dozen White Roses
• Chrysanthemum Bouquet
• Bright & Cheery
• Orange Gift Wrap

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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Simple 3 step plan to throw away £229 in less than an hour and a half.

1. 0938: Think that it might be a good idea to put up some PPC, targeting Chelsea Flower Show searches. Set up campaign at default bid levels.

2. Spend an hour wrestling payroll and our online banking system.

3. 1102: Check back to see how the campaign is going, have heart attack, frantically scrabble to pause campaign, kicking self repeatedly.

Impressive Marketing Campaign Results

Duration: 84 minutes

Impressions: 7,291 (wow)

Average position: 1.2 (quite high – hope we’re not overbidding)

Clicks: 716 (9.03% CTR – excellent)

Cost: £229.14 (crikey)

Sales: Zero (aaaargh!)

Conclusion: Let’s just put those 84 minutes down as a brand awareness exercise or something.

:(

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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This little credit card thingy is just about the most important widget in our business. We need this smart card to make all our payments – to our Dutch suppliers, to employees, to, well, everyone. It plugs into the side of my laptop. If we don’t use it when we make international payments, we have to revert to a ridiculously arcane faxpayments mechanism akin to waving a black flag in the dark at someone looking the other way. With their eyes shut. I invariably mess that up, don’t realise I’ve done so and then our Dutch suppliers ring up and shout at me, with good reason. Brilliant.

Given this is such an important piece of kit, I therefore look after it very carefully. I would never, for instance, sling my laptop into its bag, with said card still inserted. Because if I did that, then the card might get all bent out of shape and stop working, then no-one would get paid.

Oh.

:(

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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