A representative from Stratus, recently brought it to our attention that flower retailers tend to be unprepared for Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day: “Unfortunately, as history will tell us, we’re bound to see IT downtime on one of the busiest days for flower retailers, potentially crippling businesses in the process.”

A study from Uptrends.com was conducted over a 24 hour period to determine whether the websites of online flower shops were easily accessible to potential customers on these flowery holidays. Of the 10 sites surveyed:

7 flower shops scored very well with an availability rate of 100 percent. These include online flower shops such as FTD.com, proflowers.com, teleflora.com, kabloom.com, flower.com, and blue-roses-delivery.com. The 3 other remaining online flower shops received lower scores. The website of 1800flowers.com had a 99.78 percent availability rate. This means that the site was not available for almost 7 minutes. The website fromyouflowers.com, experienced 99.32 percent availability. This means that the website not available for over 21 minutes during the 24 hours period the study was conducted. Flowerdeliveryexpress.com, suffered the highest rate of availability issues of the sites tested. Over the 24 hour period, the website experienced over 3.45 hours of downtime during the busiest time of the year. Flowersdeliveryexpress.com must have suffered considerable damage to their revenue stream due to the fact that their website was not available for such a lengthy time and therefore were unable were not able to receive orders via the website.

IT downtime results in the loss of revenue and customer dissatisfaction — yet flower retailers fail to address the issue.

Stratus Technologies conducted large-scale surveys with ITIC around this topic to better understand why retailers fail to improve their IT efficiency and found that half of all businesses don’t calculate their cost of downtime, and the ones that do are greatly underestimating their costs.

Feel free to share some of your online flower shopping experiences.