Counting Roses And Teddy BearsCounting Roses And Teddy Bears

As 1-800-Flowers.com recovers from one of its busiest holidays, IT and business managers at the online retailer will begin scouring clickstream data reports to learn what sold, what didn't, and what the company can do better as it approaches Mother's Day--the biggest holiday for flowers.

The company, which expects to sell $500 million in flowers, gifts, candy, and other products online and over the phone this year, is using NetGenesis Web software from SPSS Inc. to analyze clickstream data from its Web site. Data from the five days before Valentine's Day is still being loaded into a data warehouse, says Rich Minns, application development manager. Once that's done, IT managers will use the collected data to evaluate the Web site's performance from the two weeks leading up to Valentine's Day, when 1-800-Flowers handles several hundred thousand orders.

Last year, 1-800-Flowers suffered some problems when it was unable to fill all orders for Valentine's Day roses and teddy bears. In the two days before the holiday in 2001, the retailer's Web site had 489,000 visitors, according to PC Data Online.

Marketers at the retailer will also tap into the new information when it's added to the five year's worth of data previously collected from the Web site and stored in a data warehouse. They hope to spot customer buying trends and identify the Web sites that customers come from when accessing 1-800-Flowers for possible business partnerships. All this data will help the company manage its site for Mother's Day, when 1-800-Flowers gets as many as 150,000 in a single day.

The retailer has used NetGenesis since October 2000. NetGenesis Corp. was acquired by Chicago-based SPSS late last year.