If you follow the list of top online retailers in terms of conversion, you must notice that online flower stores usually make it to the top of the list on a regular basis.

In June of this year 3 flower/gift online stores stood out amongst the top 5 e-tailers by conversion rate.

These three ecommerce sites are:

• ProFlowers with 28.4% conversion rate
• FTD with 24.3% conversion rate
• 1800Flowers with 20.3% conversion rate

In May, ProFlowers also made it to the number spot on Neilsen’s Online Marketing Charts with a whopping 35.7% conversion rate. Similarly, 1800flowers.com and FTD were still amongst the top 10 in May as well. In April, however, ProFlowers made it to the top spot but its competitors were not as fortunate that particular month.

Clearly, we must bear in mind that as the visitor navigates to these sites, there is a strong motive to make a purchase in the first place. Sometimes even if the site is not very user-friendly but the motive is strong enough (the price is low, you are in need of the product etc.), the buyer will oversee the many glaring errors throughout the site. Still however, conversion numbers over 25% are a rarity amongst ecommerce sites motive or not: so there are still best practices to be learned from these sites.

I initially thought that ProFlowers was not listed in Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Retailer. But with a little research I realized that their parent company, QVC an online retailer power house, is listed. My research indicates that ProFlowers makes over $300 million in annual revenue; which would put them at one of the top 100 online retailers. Both 1800Flowers and FTD are also on the same list: 1800Flowers annual revenue is around $501 million and FTD’s annual revenue is around $260 million.

With 30% of the top converting sites coming from the flowers/gifts category, it would be worth to spend time investigating that sector, its top and poor performing retailers.

Looking at the pack

Of the Internet Retailer’s Top 500 there are a total of 14 websites ranked in the category of Flowers/Gifts. Let’s rank revenue for each of these sites:

The Annual Conversion rates for these e-tailers are below:

Which of these stores had an offline presence before the web?

8 of the 15 ecommerce sites in the flowers/gifts category utilize a call center and catalog to capture orders. 6 of the companies on the other hand are strictly web based.

It is common that many of these companies (which started between 1994 – 2000), started with a web presence. However, statistically, many of the catalog/call center e-tailers are performing better (in terms of annual sales and conversion rates) than those without a mere web presence.

Let’s take a look at the SEO for these sites:

Again, notice how the two sites with the highest conversion rates have the highest number of link-backs.

And although FTD Group has less incoming links(135k), its Google Page Rank is better than Proflowers.com which has 5 times as many in links(609k). Generally, those e-tailers that have a PR of 0 have a conversion rate of less than 6%.

Clearly, the top sites in online revenue and conversion rates have the highest PR and number of link backs. What’s shocking is to see a company like PersonalCreations.com with a PR of 5 has only 290 link backs throughout the entire site. This leads me wonder whether my Yahoo site explorer is capturing the number of links backs correctly or not.

Finally, a number that has an impact on conversion rates is the number of search engine shoppers. Below is a table that captures all of that information:

Notice how the top three sites with most search engine shoppers have between a 3.5 – 6% conversion rate. The conclusion: with such a high number of search engine shoppers we can conclude that a large percentage of the shoppers are not finding what they are looking for: so either the sites are ranked for the wrong search terms or the site isn’t delivering on customer expectations.

I will continue to examine the flower/gift category more closely, and in particular, five competing top etailers: Proflowers.com, 1800Flowers.com, FTD.com, GiftTree.com, and JustFlowers.com . My next two blogs will focus on the homepages of these 5 online retailers in order to illustrate their significantly varying conversion rates. Stay tuned.