The future of the retail floral industry.
Will your online business be ready?
Google I/O is an event that features highly technical, in-depth sessions focused on building web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies such as Android, Chrome, and more.
There were two exciting announcements that I saw at this year’s Google I/O event that will affect our industry, and floral eCommerce companies better be on their game or lose more money from the big corporate websites. The first is exciting news was Google’s ‘Instant Apps,’ and the other was ‘Google Home.’
Google’s ‘Instant Apps’ will allow a user to click a link in his or her email, for example, and have only a portion of the app run on the phone without having to download the entire app. THIS IS A GAME CHANGER!!! YOU HAVE NO IDEA. I have never been a supporter of floral apps, and am still not, but this new “2.0” app feature changes everything, and it will be the next wave of mobile eCommerce standards. I am fully on board with this new “2.0” version of mobile apps, and it is something you should be paying attention to, too.
This is more bad news for the current floral apps and will continue to be less and less relative as ‘Instant Apps’ become more popular. Instant apps will be out on Android first, but like most things, in the last couple of years, it will hopefully reach the 30% of iPhone users in a year or two. Those companies betting on these “1.0” type floral apps, should pay attention closely to the evolving events taking place.
Google Home is kind of like Amazon’s Echo, but much much more powerful. Basically, it’s like Google Now, which has been renamed Google Assistant, but integrated into your home and life events. Google’s assistant is like Apple’s Siri, but much more robust. One example: you can ask Google Assistant, “Where is Big Ben?” and she will answer, “In London, England.” You then ask, “Who’s the prime minister there?” and she will return, “David Cameron.” You can then ask, “What’s his political affiliation?” and Google assistant will return, “The Conservative Party.” And so on…
So why is this so important to the floral industry online? This is important because when a person uses Google Home to order flowers, verbally, it will need to ask and know a lot of specifics about the order and Google Home is poised to make that happen. Watch the video and imagine the lady ordering flowers and the Google Assistant asking her questions back, like, when do you want us to send the order or what do you want this birthday card to say? Soooo cool, right? 🙂
Will your online business developer have your website/app ready to take advantage of these new technologies? I hope so, because you know the big corporations will be ready. If you’re already an epicFlorist, there is no need to worry because we eat, breathe and live floral tech innovation.