FTD meltdown, leaves florists and consumers alike in the dog house!
From http://realflorists.flowerchat.com/2...ry-valentines/
Word of an FTD
Tech melt-down started brewing on florist message boards on Friday,
February 9, when flower shop owners started reporting orders sent
through FTD's proprietary Mercury Network
as not getting through to their stores. Some of the florists said FTD's
Tech department was initially blaming interfaces with Point Of Sale
systems sold by third party vendors.
Quote:
|
"After umteen phone calls finally a tech told me that all high-speed
intranet members a gadget that is connected to host is down and that is
what they are working on." |
Quote:
|
"We started the holiday on DSL and serious problems for two days, with
FTD telling us it was our fault. We were fortunate enough to still have
the old equipment sitting there so we went back to the good ol
modem--which worked fine the rest of the holiday. We invested a good
amount of time, effort and money in moving our system to dsl and to
have it fail us during the holiday is a joke." |
What ensued in the
days leading up to and including February 14, Valentine's Day, was a
catastrophic failure of the web-based Mercury Direct interface to the
host computer housed in Downers Grove, IL - leaving FTD member florists
to scramble as best they could to retrieve flower orders sold by FTD.com itself, other florists and via their own FTD-hosted websites.
Quote:
|
"February 12 and 13 we had almost no orders sent to us from our web
site to our POS system. We had to go to the web portal and print them
out one by one. Each order we had to log in a second time to view the
credit card information and hand writes the credit card #. Every order
had to be typed into our POS system. The format they print out from the
portal is hard to read." |
Ironically, FTD members with older
technology interfaces - dial-up MIMs and modems, were able to access
the Downers Grove host. But their orders still had severe problems
since the communications never made their way to the filling florists
using web-based Mercury Direct.
Quote:
|
"it's the new MNAPI system that frequently goes offline. Most of the
time it's not noticed by the majority of shops - if it's offline for an
afternoon in July, 80% of shops won't catch it, unless they become
suspicious due to the lack of marketplace ad GEN messages. |
Quote:
By our records, it was down on Feb 12, 13 and 14th. The biggest problem
was that shops on dial-up were sending, but shops on Merc Direct
weren't able to receive. Our orders were being bounced all over God's
green earth, and resulted in many "That's not in our area" rejects." |
FTD's Affiliate Order Gatherers Abandon Ship
Some FTD affiliates who also belonged to competing wire services like
Telefora and 1-800-Flowers' Bloomnet, used those networks to send
outgoing orders, with a number of florists expressed surprise at
receiving Teleflora and Bloomnet orders from FTD's top affiliate
resellers (order gatherers).
How much of an impact?
The numbers of lost, undelivered orders is unknown as of today but
florists have shared their knowledge of the real and potential impact:
Quote:
"From a very reliable source, there are two (flower) shops in one of
the largest states that belong to FTD. One shop got 250 Mercury orders,
the other 200 Mercury orders AT THE END OF THE DAY ON THE 14TH.
There was no way to reject the orders. JUST 2 SHOPS, 450 ORDERS. IF
THERE WERE JUST 1,000 FTD SHOPS WHO HAD THE SAME PROBLEM WITH MERCURY,
THAT WOULD BE 250,000 FLOWER BUYERS WHO MAY DECIDE TO NOT SEND FLOWERS
AGAIN." |
Quote:
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"To date (I) have spoken to over 70 florists that could not get orders
through to us and several hundred coast to coast that suffered greatly.
|
FTD's Lack of a Back-Up Plan
Information from former FTD insiders shows how such a catastrophic failure could occur:
Quote:
"(The) EFOS (Florist Electronic Order System) or the Real (OLD) Mercury
System was not at fault.... It was the new interface that connects the
internet to EFOS was the issue I have heard different stories, that it
was hard ware, a Firewall that went bad. Too many orders for server to
handle,... What ever...
The issue is equipment goes bad, telephone lines or cables get cut, but
there needs to be some type of Redundancy which is missing... But let
me let you they have redundancy for FTD.COM's 3 call centers" |
Quote:
|
"It's going to cost FTD a bundle now but they are going to have to set
up a different system with pods in several areas so that if a problem
occurs in one area orders can be automatically be rerouted through
another pod and continue on it's merry way to the final destination
(the recipient).
Phone companies have systems like that in place.......when a major
phone line goes down all long distance calls are redirected, it may
slow things down a little but it usually doesn't kill the system and if
enough pods are used it would only effect a small section of the
landscape. |
Quote:
It only makes common sense, when we order flowers for a major holiday
most of us don't order everything from one supplier to all come in on
the day before (I sure don't). FTD did and now it's really going to
cost them big $$$ to fix along with a loss in unhappy members that will
likely resign after this episode......not to mention the ton of
customers that will not trust the floral industry any more.....Not just FTD but all flower vendors will suffer because all FTD's eggs were in one basket."
|
A Failure to Communicate
Frustration from florists abounds at FTD's inability to inform them the system was non-functioning.
Quote:
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"What I am finding appalling is the lack of them letting us know
somehow there was a problem - but then again - how are they going to do
that? By Mercury?" |
Blame and Apologies
Most disturbing to FTD florists are reports of consumers being told far-too-late that their
Valentine's Day flower orders would not be delivered, and an
FTD spokeswoman even blaming non-deliveries on lack of 'product availability'.
Sadly, many florists reported having the flowers and staffs in place to fill those orders - it's just that FTD technology
Failed
To
Deliver consumer's purchase requests.
Quote:
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"Sorry does not cover the losses the shops incurred and we feel for the smaller shops that took a severe beating."
|
Quote:
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"Who was hurt in this whole mess up was any CONSUMER that made a
purchase from FTD.com, OGs (order gatherers), or FTD florists. |
FTD's technology failure and lack of
communication with consumers and florists looks to make this the most
complaint-filled and costliest Valentine's Day in the ninety-seven year
history of the company.
__________________
Thankfully Smith's has back up technology of their own, and belongs to the Bloomlink Network, as well as using MAS-Direct for our order transfer. We did not lose one out going order this Valentines.