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Interflora’s Product Discovery Blooms With Bloomreach Discovery

Florist Holding a Bouquet with Interflora Logo Represented

Story Behind the Brand

Founded in 1908, Interflora, a global floriculture network, has revolutionized flower delivery over the past century. Establishing a network of local florists to fulfill orders, Interflora has kept this principle central to its operations even today. With approximately 58,000 affiliated flower shops in over 140 countries, Interflora sends thousands of flower orders across the globe each day — all backed by its commitment to impeccable freshness and quality.

The flower delivery company was embarking on a two-year journey committed to digital transformation. However, even with Interflora’s redesigned virtual storefront, the brand still wanted to continue highlighting the work of its local florists’ handcrafted arrangements. By starting with Bloomreach Discovery’s ecommerce site search, merchandising, and recommendations capabilities, Interflora has found the right solution for its future success. 

17.5
%
lift in category revenue per visit
4
percentage points
decrease in search bounce rate
1.1
percentage points
increase in search conversion rate

Challenge

Despite Interflora’s strong presence across France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and beyond — which includes an extensive network of florists — Interflora struggled to provide a seamless online customer experience. In terms of B2C retail, Interflora was still fairly digitally immature but was eager to put its first-ever site search bar on its website. However, because Interflora lacked the tools to understand product data and customer behavior and preferences effectively, it was difficult to personalize marketing efforts and improve customer engagement. These issues were compounded by the growing competition from both traditional florists and new online-only flower delivery services, which added pressure on Interflora to innovate and enhance its digital offerings.

Given the multilingual demands of Interflora’s operations across different countries, the search bar also needed to be agile in its contextual understanding and capable of effectively processing French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Additionally, Interflora aimed to demonstrate the value of its new digital capabilities with clear, actionable metrics and was focused on measuring the impact of these changes on revenue — particularly through improvements in search and merchandising.

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Solution

To help it tap into a new revenue channel, Interflora turned to Bloomreach Discovery for its powerful search and merchandising capabilities. Interflora has already implemented Discovery’s search functionality and category APIs on its websites for Italy, Spain, and Portugal, with Interflora France slated next for implementation. Due to the massive data set Bloomreach has built over the past decade, Interflora could immediately take advantage of Loomi AI to learn from its specific products and customer base across four languages. 

First, Interflora focused on training, enablement, and feedback, hoping to fully integrate with Bloomreach’s advanced search capabilities to better personalize the shopping experience. Second, the team leveraged Bloomreach’s ranking algorithm to rank products by performance, personalization, or relevance (or a combination of all three) based on signals like add-to-carts, conversions, and revenue. Third, Interflora used various recall algorithms, such as spell correct, facet precision, and text match precision. For example, a search for “red roses bouquet” would include relevant facets like “Flower Type,” “Bouquet Size,” or “Occasion,” while deprioritizing irrelevant facets like “Vases,” “Gifts,” or “Chocolates.” Or, if a customer searches for a “red roses bouquet,” Loomi AI can retrieve all the products for which there is a match on both “red” and “roses bouquet.” 

Now, the merchandising team can work more efficiently and minimize the need for manual tweaks. Moreover, Bloomreach’s 34,000+ auto-generated synonyms constantly update across languages, further enhancing search accuracy and user experience. The implementation has also empowered the merchandising team during peak periods, like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, by utilizing global rules to manage product displays. For these special holiday campaigns, the floral delivery company adjusts product rankings to highlight certain items — even for unrelated searches — to support targeted marketing strategies. These rules are time-bound, reverting to normal after the holiday without manual updates. Plus, when certain flowers (e.g., sunflowers) are out of season, the system displays similar items (e.g., other yellow flowers) to avoid null results and maintain engagement. As Loomi AI continues to learn and adapt, Interflora is well-positioned for ongoing innovation and growth.

Bloomreach has significantly transformed our approach to product discovery. Our team can now leverage a combination of AI and merchandising intuition to create engaging experiences for our customers.

Manu Arjo, Head of Product at Interflora

Manu Arjo

Head of Product, Interflora

Results

Interflora has seen continuous improvements in key performance metrics following the implementation of Bloomreach Discovery. Over the first five months, the conversion rate (CVR) has experienced a 1.1% percentage point increase, while the search bounce rate has seen a 4% percentage point decrease. These improvements highlight the effectiveness of Bloomreach’s product discovery tools in enhancing customer engagement and driving better business outcomes through the search bar, facets, and category pages. Another win for Interflora was improving its category revenue per visitor (RPV) by 17.5% since implementing site search and making it easier for customers to navigate through its range of bouquets and accompanying gifts. During Mother’s Day in May, a peak time of year for the flower delivery service, search contributed to a 221% revenue jump, showcasing the value of effective search optimization during peak periods.

The primary objectives of the Bloomreach Discovery implementation were to enhance merchandising efficiency and achieve a strong return on investment (ROI). Interflora has already started to meet these goals by efficiently managing and scaling its capabilities, enabling its small team to maintain and update its user interface without relying on IT. With the incorporation of Bloomreach’s automation tools, the Interflora team is focusing on establishing clear workflows for regular maintenance and updates. As Bloomreach Discovery continues to improve main performance metrics and ensure a systematic approach for continuous testing and optimization, Interflora is setting a new standard for both high efficiency and performance in its operations.

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