Interview: Success Story of Indonesian-made Flower and Gift Online Delivery Service FlowerAdvisor

There's not many Indonesian-made e-commerce industry that be able to stretch its market beyond local market and FlowerAdvisor is one of them. Founded in Singapore in 2007, FlowerAdvisor is able to send fresh flowers and gifts in more than 100 countries and bring quite amount of revenues every year (now reach more than US$ 1 million), with most operations now are performed in Jakarta. We've been spoken to FlowerAdvisor's Willy Thomas about this phenomenon and he's keen to share the success story with us. Here's the our interview:

Tell us about FlowerAdvisor

FlowerAdvisor is founded in 2007 but was launched officially in singapore in 2008. FlowerAdvisor came about as a result of a prominent absence of a single strong brand in Asia for International Flower Delivery. We are an international Flowers & Gifts E Commerce that delivers to more than 100 countries in the world with same day and next day delivery. Our headquarter is located in Singapore and in 2008, we open our operational office in Jakarta, Indonesia.

How do you manage the team in several countries and still be able to deliver fresh flowers?

Most of the business operational are done in Jakarta. The Singapore office is for our headquarters as our biggest market is still the singapore market.

We are able to deliver fresh flowers since we worked with local florist in every country, We are able to deliver the Flowers & Gifts on the same and next day from the date of order.

What unique technology do you implement to support the business?

We built our own technology, The technologies are customized according to our requirement. The technologies that we used to facilitate our business are the followings:

• RTAOPS (Real Time Automated Order Processing System) - When we received the order from the customer, the order will be processed automatically. The order will be sent automatically from our system to our local florist thus this will ensure that the orders will be taken care even if there is problems with our operational office.
• Bidding System - We have bidding system in placed therefore we can ensure that our prices will be competitive as the supplier with the lowest cost price will win the order
• International API Program - Although there are a lot of online florists in the world, most of them can only cater to the local market therefore we created international API which will empowered local florist with our International Catalogue. With our API, There will be no FlowerAdvisor branding at all and The local florist will be transformed into international gifts e commerce in which they are able to accept orders for delivery to more than 100 countries immediately.

What's you expansion plan for the coming years?

Our vision is to be the no 1 destination for international gifts delivery as there are still no prominent player. In order to achieve our vision we have to start with Asia market therefore we are planning to invest more in online & offline marketing for other Asia countries. Currently we only focuses our marketing effort in Singapore and Indonesia Market

Focusing on Indonesian market, how is the business so far?

Although we have been having our Indonesia operational office in 2008, We only focused on the Indonesia market in 2010 as the market is still not ready back in 2008. There is no proper infrastructure and to make the matter worse there is lack of trust & confident for users in Indonesia to do online transactions.

After focusing in Indonesia market, we can see that there is a significant improvement in the Indonesia sales as the market has grown more matured. We have doubled our performance every year from 2010 and we foresees that Indonesia will be taking over Singapore as our biggest market soon. Followed up by Malaysia & Hong Kong.