When UrbanStems needed to scale their premium flower delivery business, they faced a choice: stay constrained by their existing platform or make a bold move just months before their biggest sales period of the year. The decade-old company chose transformation, migrating from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify Plus in just four months—launching their new site mere months before Valentine's Day 2025.
The decision paid off dramatically. Not only did UrbanStems deliver their most successful Valentine's Day ever with zero downtime, but they also unlocked new growth opportunities across their subscription business, customer acquisition, and operational efficiency that had been impossible on their previous platform.
After migrating from Salesforce to Shopify, UrbanStems experienced:
- 7% YoY subscription growth and 11% new subscriptions purchased YoY
- 180% YoY subscription growth during their first December
- 15% TCO reduction across the entire tech stack
- 27% increase in new customer acquisition with 8% lower CAC for Valentine’s Day
- 23% increase in sessions with a 30% increase in product page views
- 11% increase in add-to-cart rate, 8% increase in average order value YoY
- Zero downtime during peak Valentine's Day traffic
The challenge: Arranging innovative customer experiences on a rigid commerce platform
For UrbanStems, growth had become a constant battle against their own technology. As a premium flower delivery company serving customers across the United States, they needed a platform that could match their ambitions for innovation, personalization, and seamless customer experiences. Instead, they found themselves repeatedly hitting walls. Saschi Klee, VP of Digital Commerce at UrbanStems, new change was necessary to flourish.
If we can't be innovative, if we can't be agile, if we can't really create anything new for our customers, it felt like there was a catalyst for change right there.
The problems manifested across multiple areas of their business. On Salesforce Commerce Cloud, even seemingly simple improvements required significant development effort. Adding product videos—crucial for showcasing their beautiful, unique floral arrangements—meant substantial custom work, ongoing maintenance, and potential site speed risks. The platform's limitations meant UrbanStems couldn't easily create the modern, visually rich product experiences their premium positioning demanded.
Subscriptions were wilting
Their subscription business faced even more severe constraints. Despite knowing that subscription customers had nearly double the lifetime value of regular customers ($500 vs $250), UrbanStems couldn't grow this crucial revenue stream effectively.
The lack of self-service capabilities meant every subscription change required a customer service call, creating operational inefficiency and customer friction. Due to the manual maintenance required from the team, the subscription program was declining 50% month-over-month, representing massive lost revenue potential.
I think 80% of our call volume around subscriptions was just to help manage orders. The things that we are now allowing customers to do themselves with Shopify.
Taking a risk right before peak season
Peak season performance created additional stress. Valentine's Day—UrbanStems' equivalent of Black Friday—required extensive preparation including manual provisioning of additional processing power, coordination with standby technical teams, and constant monitoring.
Despite all this preparation, they still experienced site speed issues and delayed analytics that hampered real-time decision making during their most critical sales period. Saschi knew they couldn’t afford to wait another year for a better solution.
At Shoptalk 2024, Saschi had conversations with development agencies. “Six months feels risky but doable,” they told Saschi. But she challenged them by asking, “can we do it faster?” If they were going to move platforms, it needed to be well before their biggest holiday of the year, and that’s not Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
Valentine's Day was coming up and we really wanted to test this out. We knew that if we were going to understand how these systems were going to perform, we needed to do it during peak season.
The solution: A strategic decision to migrate 4 months before Valentine's Day
Faced with mounting platform limitations and a small window of opportunity, UrbanStems made a bold decision: migrate to Shopify Plus just four months before the 2024 holiday season in order to be ready for Valentine's Day 2025.
The migration wasn't just a platform switch—it was a complete site redesign focused on showcasing UrbanStems' premium positioning. The team invested heavily in reimagining their product pages, knowing these were crucial conversion points for customers unfamiliar with their floral offerings.
To us, it is showing that our customers are really engaging with our product pages. There's a lot of information on there, whether or not it be what type of stems are in the bouquet or where they come from, or how they're gonna be delivered, or even what additional add-ons you can purchase.
The team took a strategic approach, splitting the project into two distinct streams: a front-end team focused on customer journeys and experience, and a back-end team handling integrations and third-party migrations. This allowed them to make substantial changes across their entire tech stack while maintaining focus on the customer experience.
UrbanStems redesigned their entire website with on improving their product pages to better educate customers about products, add-ons, and the gifting experience. The team also overhauled their subscription program with a new self-service customer portal that gives customers the ability to choose bouquets, pause deliveries, and adjust dates without ever having to contact customer service.
Critically, UrbanStems could now showcase customer reviews and social proof across their site, building the trust essential for gifting purchases. The new checkout experience, powered by Shop Pay, was customized for gifting with prompts ensuring customers confirm delivery addresses—crucial when most orders ship to someone else.
On the backend, UrbanStems connected Shopify with their existing NetSuite system and maintained their homegrown "Dash" system, which handles critical inventory routing and delivery logic for perishable products across their network of facilities.
Four and a half months later, from the day we signed the contract with our development partner, we were live on Shopify. We actually saw our first order come in just four minutes after launch.
The results: A flourishing holiday season and the foundation for future innovation
The true test came on Valentine's Day 2025—and UrbanStems exceeded all expectations. The transformation delivered immediate, measurable impact across every key metric.
The reliability improvements were dramatic. Where previous Valentine's Days required extensive infrastructure preparation and still resulted in performance issues, Shopify's auto-scaling handled peak traffic seamlessly. Real-time analytics gave the team unprecedented visibility into customer behavior, enabling agile adjustments to promotions and content throughout the day.
This year on Shopify, what we were really excited about is there was no downtime for our customers. So customers were able to check out even in that last hour.
Customer acquisition saw remarkable improvement, with a 27% increase in new customers while simultaneously reducing customer acquisition costs by 8%. The enhanced product pages drove 30% more product views, and the improved user experience translated to an 11% increase in add-to-cart rates. Sessions increased 23% year-over-year, with customers spending more time engaging with UrbanStems' premium offerings.
The subscription transformation proved equally impressive. After months of decline, the program began growing 180% month-over-month. Customers could now manage their subscriptions independently, eliminating the friction that had previously driven 80% of customer service calls. The team launched single SKU subscriptions and tier upgrades—capabilities that were impossible on their previous platform.
We've seen about 7% growth year over year in our subscription program since launching in November. And for us, that is a huge metric to lean into. We know that our subscription customer is definitely a more loyal customer.
The operational improvements extended beyond just customer-facing features. The new platform enabled rapid experimentation and iteration, with development cycles reduced from months to days or weeks. This agility allowed UrbanStems to respond quickly to customer feedback and market opportunities.
Average order value increased 8% year-over-year, driven partly by enhanced product bundling capabilities and improved trust signals like customer reviews. Over 50% of Valentine's Day customers used Shop Pay, demonstrating strong adoption of Shopify's checkout ecosystem.
Ultimately, the migration to Shopify eliminated several costly third-party tools, streamlined their tech stack, and achieved double-digit total cost of ownership reduction.
Building the future of gifting subscriptions on Shopify
The Valentine's Day success was just the beginning. UrbanStems has used the insights and capabilities gained through their Shopify migration to fundamentally transform their approach to growth and customer experience.
The cost savings from their reduced tech stack have been reinvested into experimentation and growth initiatives. Their Meta advertising budget expanded from $500 per day to over $8,000 per day while maintaining lower customer acquisition costs—a testament to the improved conversion rates and customer experience.
The move to Shopify for us has meant we can be agile. We are flexible. We are disruptive in a lot of ways, and we're showing up for our customers when they need us to be there.
Looking ahead, UrbanStems is leveraging their new platform capabilities to pursue ambitious growth initiatives including gifting subscriptions, AI-powered shopping assistance, and enhanced personalization. The rapid landing page creation capabilities have enabled more sophisticated customer segmentation and tailored experiences based on traffic sources and customer intent.
The transformation from constraint to capability has positioned UrbanStems to continue their trajectory as innovators in the premium gifting space, with the technical foundation to support whatever growth opportunities emerge next.
Four minutes after launching their new Shopify site, UrbanStems received their first order from a longtime customer—a perfect symbol of how innovation and reliability can flourish together when you have the right platform foundation.
