Petal & Post website redesign 

Increase conversion and lower customer support. Research-led redesign for a South African flower delivery business with unusually complex constraints

The brief

Petal & Post is a South African flower delivery service with delivery routes in Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg. When they came to us ahead of a planned website redesign, they had a problem their analytics couldn’t explain: Why exactly customers were dropping out of key purchase flows.

The site had real structural complexity underneath its straightforward appearance. Products varied by delivery location. Add-on gifts couldn’t be purchased without a posy. Stock changed throughout the day. The standard e-commerce mental model didn’t fit, and the site wasn’t doing enough to help customers navigate that.

The challenge

Petal & Post’s business model has rules that most e-commerce sites don’t. Because the posies were unique to the location, customers need to specify delivery location before they can see available products but asking for that decision before browsing creates friction. Smaller gifts are only purchasable alongside a posy, but hiding them until that point makes the range feel smaller than it is. Same-day stock availability changes in real time, which was creating dead ends and unexpected errors at checkout.

These aren’t design problems with simple fixes. They’re constraints baked into how the business operates and we don’t want to push these constraints onto the customer. The job was to understand how real customers were experiencing them, then design flows that worked within those constraints rather than against them.

The previous version of the Petal & Post home page

What we did

We worked with the Petal & Post team across three phases over three years.

In early 2021, we ran usability testing with existing and prospective customers, observing how people actually attempted to browse, select, and buy. We also conducted a comprehensive UX audit of the existing site, reviewing it against ecommerce best practice and the specific realities of the Petal & Post model. The findings were clear enough to act on some immediately. The team made a set of targeted improvements to the existing site before any rebuild began, refining product wording, improving menu navigation, and reducing the points where customers were getting confused.

In 2023 we returned for the full redesign phase. This involved customer journey mapping to surface the mismatch between the business’s logic and customers’ mental models, UX wireframes and flow design for the rebuilt site, and a series of collaborative design workshops with the designer, developer, and business stakeholders to pressure-test solutions against real operational constraints.

After that we have been involved in small iterations, updates and new features over time ensuring our UX principles remain intact.

The new site wasn’t built on assumptions, it was built on evidence from years of watching real customers use the existing one.

A screenshot of the UX audit planning board

What changed

The quick wins from the 2021 research (refined wording and clearer navigation) reduced customer queries almost immediately. The 2023 rebuild compounded that.

After the 2023 rebuild and the subsiqent itterations the weekly order growth increased from around 10 additional orders per week to around 40. The average number of products per order rose from two to three, reflecting stronger product discovery and cross-selling. Customer query volume fell and has remained lower, freeing up internal resources. The new architecture also made it possible to introduce more complex products without adding friction to the purchase flow.

In Petal & Posts’ own words