Tag Archives: Yourflowerplace.com

Bice’s Florist, of Dallas-Forth Worth, is a florist that has been in business since 1974. Five years ago, a new owner, Keith Riewe, bought the business and he tells IncTechnology.com that by revising his website and buying new Internet domain names, he was able to increase sales by $1.5 million a year. Elizabeth Wasserman: How has the Internet changed the florist business? Keith Riewe: It’s changed our business tremendously. When we bought the business in 2003, we had six locations throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area. We went out and built a really robust website, an e-commerce site, and what that’s allowed us to do is close all those remote locations. We found that people were not walking into flower shops. They’re finding us on the Internet or calling us on the phone. We’ve taken six brick and mortar stores and now we have only one. And yet we have increased sales by $1.5 million. If I live in Dallas and I want to send flowers to someone in St. Louis, I’ll type in “St. Louis florist” into a search engine and that will pop up a list of florists in that area. Wasserman: So how has that changed your business model? Riewe: There’s been a huge shift in our industry because of order gatherers – people who do nothing but collect order. They don’t fulfill orders. That used to be a strong business. All they would do is get orders and send them out to the flower shops and collect 20 percent on the front end of that order. Now we have the ability to compete for those orders, along with FTD, Flowers.com and other companies. Wasserman: How did you start competing with the big guys? Riewe: We went out and bought descriptive domain names through Sedo, an online marketplace for buying and selling domain names. We’ve gotten control of over at least 20 different domain names. In addition to Bicesflorist.com, we have names like Flowernut.com, Fortworthflowers.com, Superflowerlink.com and Yourflowerplace.com. The way we use these different names is, for instance, we will have a domain name that we put in printed ad material. We will send out a  catalog and put in another a unique URL. The one we use for that is Flowernut.com. That helps us track the performance of that particular advertising campaign. We know whether we’re spending money in the right direction. We now use that in all types of things — from printed ads, online marketing, radio and TV ads – so we can see what is actually working. The biggest reason we have all these domain names is that small businesses spend so much money on marketing and they don’t know how it’s working. If we can track that information, we can better spend our advertising dollars. In the end, they all lead to the same website, Bice’s homepage. Wasserman: What have the results been? Riewe: We’ve seen a lot of positive results. We were in a Yellow Pages ad, but we pulled out of it. It was not performing at a level we needed it to. We found out because we had a unique URL in the ad and also a telephone number. We found out that when people call us or contact us it is primarily through the Internet. They get to our website but about 83 percent of people still call us versus placing an order through the Internet, although the number of people who buy from us online has risen dramatically from what it used to be. Primarily we use the domain names for tracking gross sales and advertising. We spend a tremendous amount of money on advertising and, if you spend that amount of money, any business needs to know where their customers are coming from.