Arena Flowers - an arrangement that came up smelling of Roses.

Whilst many horticultural business's have struggled to find a way to fit the web into their business models, one company, purely web based, has taken off in a big way.

Arena Flowers, which is based in London's Park Royal, started trading in 2006. The company turned over £2 million and broke even in the first twelve months. Turnover is set to double to £4 million in year two.

Speaking in an interview on e-Consultancy.com, Web developer Sam Barton says that most of their phenomenal success can be attributed to achieving a page rank of five before the their e-commerce site went live.

What the Arena Flowers business has demonstrated is the importance of developing great search engine optimization and brand awareness of the business. Anyone can have a great website but if your target market does not know about you it means diddly squat.

Arena says that 15% of their traffic comes through having a Face Book presence and although there is a lower conversion rate, it still means business is generated and of course that means more profits.

I come across many garden centre and landscaping sites that stick content and offers onto their front page and leave them gathering dust for weeks at a time. When dates and relevancy do not fit with the product then your customers quickly become turned off and walk away.

Sam Barton goes on to say that they monitor hot spots and popular products and ensure that they are always placed on the hottest position on the site. The less patronised the product the more it is sent to the periphery.

Arena are now faced with the dillema of focussing purely on their flower business or developing their highly successful platform for other e commerce business'.

Comments

[Richard Boyd]

The page rank comment is total tosh and has not been relevant for at least 18 months, could be longer I lose track, e.g. I can show sites that have no PR but rank in the SERPs

But the site has been SEO'd well and whilst I'm not a fan of traditional looking floral displays they are a company that know where they are going.

Great post Phil I love the idea of mixing business with hort, great stuff and thanks.

[Will - ArenaFlowers.com]

Hi, Phil - thanks for the post.

Richard - you're right about the little green bar PR no longer being relevant (in fact, if you look at our site now, we only have 2 pages with official, green bar PR on our entire site, after google removed it all a few weeks ago for some unknown reason. There has been no discernible effect on our traffic as a result though, underlining your points that the little green bar is now largely (entirely?) irrelevant)). Sam is well aware of this, but was using it as a shorthand for saying that SEO was a key to our ability to launch ourselves rapidly.

Thanks for the comments from both and, Richard, if you'd like anything bespoke done for you, we do a lot of that too (but haven't quite figured out how to put it online (we take all bespoke orders over the phone!)).

Thanks again for your comments and please feel free to pass by our blog and have a look - we try to mix business and flowers to make (we hope) an interesting mix.