Our History:
Our ecommerce - ezflowerShop
Our Flowers Out Of Town - IPFlorist
Phase 2 IPFlorist
florist association web sites

We started as hobbyist orchid growers in minneapolis in the 1050's, my late mother Sandra M. Murphy and father Greg Murphy were charter members of the Minnesota Orchid Society and have all of their lives contributed to building the upper midwest community of flower and especially, orchid lovers.

In that spirit of building and nurturing, I continue with in that endeavor, often tirelessly, to insure our families flower shop success as well as that, to the extent that i can, of the floral industry in the US and Canada by doing everything outline below.

We are first and foremost florist in Minneapolis, Crystal Lake Floral Design and Nurserymen with our Greenhouses, Growing Beautiful Orchids, some of which have been in our collection for over 50 years!

My parents Moved into this facility - which had been owned by the same family and selling flowers on this corner in Minneapolis for over 90 years at the time, in 1992, I had a successful Landscape Management Business GTLAWNS and all was well. By 1995 Mom asked me to come and help her run the flowershop, how could I refuse! From the outset - we were not florists and we unfortunately had an expensive learning curve the first few years, it took 3 years to work that debt off, paying off a little each week!

By 1996 a 'Geek' Friend of mine, Greg kept telling me, Murf... You have to get your shop on the web?

I would often ask him - Whats that? Are you kidding? how in the world is 'THAT' going to help our flowershop? He kept telling me "Man, you can sell our flowers on the 'Internet'". Turns out he was a huge newsgroup junkie and was well versed in the very early ways of the www! This was the days of the 2.0 browser!

By 1997 I finally acquiesced, and said "FINE"! Now what is this all about? Got my 'sprynet' dial up connection and sat there and stared at the blasted screen wondering what in the aaahhem (clearing my throat... string of very bad words) heck is this (more bad words) all about? I was stymied, completely baffled, which was very unusual for me as I was normally able to figure things out. (My first go-cart, built by me at age twelve was complete with a gas engine and a stick shift and went in reverse - but no brakes, hence the name go-cart!)

HOW IN THE WORLD DOES THIS INTERNET WORK? WHAT MAKES IT TICK?

My pal greg to the rescue, he showed me how this wonderful world of 'newsgroups' worked and soon l learned there was an addon one could get at microsoft .com you can 'put' to your browser that would allow greater flexibility in doing your web browsing, I immediatly got the addon and loaded it up (took a while to figure out how to do that!@!@!)

All of a sudden things cleared up - like a sunny day!

There was now a new tab on the browser under the 'view' tab called 'view source'. It was at this instant I realized how things worked! Literally in the blink of an eye, it made sense, there is actually a reason for the internet to work!

There is CODE behind every pretty web page - WOW! I studied this code to see what made it actually tick and very soon - within a week I had my first web site published!

For a kick - we still have it for view here orchidz.com published the fall of 1997.

From there we searched for an ecommerce company to host our web site and soon realized there was no such thing in 1997/98 as our industry was unique to ecommerce as it was gifting, destination and date driven not to mention flowers!

This was the next challenge for me. I had to understand how this thing they called ecommerce actually worked - so i studied up on this - and soon realized that there was actually underlying 'code' that produced the 'code' for the actual web page presentation and that the proverbial 'They' called this "programming".

I learned very quickly about the opensource community and this 'programming' and the wonderful opportunities that are available to people that are willing to invest time into the various projects.

We looked at many existing 'opensource ecommerce projects', tried two for a period of 2 years, oscommerce and another early entry that is now gone and saw that in order for these application to serve our long term goals we would virtually have to re-write all of the program to suite our needs, so in 1999 we started our own platform, learning how to do the PHP and MYSQL programming as we grew, we now call this ezflowerShop, which is exclusive to Crystal Lake Floral and our Selected Web Service FLorist Clients

Our robust ezflowershop florist websites will actually, virtually, (literally) run themselves for a whole year insuring you never, ever have any out of date promotions or products presented anywhere on your site! We have amazing capabilities with our rewards, coupons and refer a friend modules.

We are the very first florist in the world, to add a recently view item feature to any flower shop web site, an idea I actually got from ebay, as your shoppers browse your ezflowerShop site, the last 6 viewed product items in that order, will follow them around the site!

Starting April 2009, we will be on our 5th generation of our software, allowing shoppers to shop for multiple destinations with any combination of addon items for any specific category of product. You have a script ribbon printer? You can sell custom script ribbons for funerals, you can sell any addon for any category you wish. we will set this up for you or advanced users can do this with the online admin guide.

With this 5th generation ezflowerShop website, deliveries are pickup in store, normal or priority. Sales tax is added as line item to each fee, 1) Product for each location delivered 2) delivery fee for each location delivered 3) out of town - processing transfer fee. Sales tax can be set to serve each as per your tax collection needs - yes or no Sales tax can be collected based on State, County, or city or all 3. For our Canadian clients we have mastered the PST on GST and have complete sales tax compliance on our system for every province.

We work constantly on improving our ezflowerShop platform and will be here for many years to come!



OK -- We have ecommerce ----> how do we send flowers out of the twin cities?

In 1999 we went to a Minnesota Florist's Association Convention, and went to a class offered by FTD and the speaker was Gaylon Pyle. I credit this man with saving our business as money was flying hand over fist out the door to support AFS and FTD. When we got back from the seminars, we really did an analysis of our books and realized this wire service affiliation was costing us plenty. I also began to notice that this 'Internet Thing' was beginning to build a head of steam and and people were beginning to take notice - Including FTD.

I saw FTD as a competitor with the advent of the www and in 1999 I terminated all WS relationships for that very reason.

There was no way I would 'sleep with the enemy' and support an entity that would one day be my competitor.

This left me in a peculiar and uncomfortable position, I had no way to do my work as it related to callouts - So I got busy, and created directblooms.com.

We by then had a nice ecommerce site up and running, netblooms.com - I had done my research and compiled a list of every flowershop I could find un this great nation, at that time some 29,000 of them, put them into a database I developed that would allow the public, as well as florists to search by zip code -- this was a fairly basic zip code distance search, but nonetheless, allowed me to do my callouts, I could log into the site and leave notes to myself on any given listing for a shop that was easy to work with.

My mind is always working, sometimes to a fault. I often wake up at unite with ideas from dreams (I often dream in color), I keep a note pad at my bedside for these dreams to take notes, lest I forget.

In one of these dreams I came up with an idea to single handedly save the 'Florist Industry' by Bundling a nice 6 page web site for each one of these 29,000 florists and publish it to the www for them so they could also take advantage of the www as i have been able to do. By This time we had our own web servers (1999-2000) so we could easily do this.

We called this aspect of what we were doing netbloomsdirect.com (summer 2000). This allowed users access to the database to search for a florist, and also was indexed by all of the early search engines, Lycos. Alta vista etc and was getting good results.

These 6 page web sites would allow the 'Flower Shop' to adopt the listing that was theirs, edit details and actually load product images and then allow ordering thru the web site and we would manually FWD the order to the shop, collecting a convenience fee and of course the standard 20% at that time relay fee...

I made a mistake in this operation in that I published all of these 180,000 web pages with my toll free phone number - which was to be replaced with the shops actual phone number once they paid the annual 89.95 fee Well a few people were not happy - some thought it was great - a fellow from Nampa idaho, named Shane called me and had a nice conversation with me and advised me 'People on the flower forum' were all asking about me and wondering what in the world netbloomsdirect was?

To make a long story short, this campaign was terminated once I realized folks were not welcoming my 'help' and I was dubbed the original "ordergatherer' even though that word did not exist in 1999 (I was called allot of other things!).

As a result of that activity in 2000, there are believe it or not, some florists still harbor ill will towards me, and would prefer not to see me participating in popular florist chat sites like flowerchat.com, some 10 years later, which is ok with me as I have friends that always keep me up to date on the latest news and gossip and this actually allows me more time to sell flowers and do more work on my web site programming!

In the summer of 2007 DirectBlooms.com was rebuilt to serve my more robust needs. Now referred to as IPFlorist.com the Internet's Preferred Florist Association, where we screen applicants to be sure they have a retail walk in facility that actually 'pettels' flowers.

IPflorist.com is an amazing website offering portals to the public as well as the florist, each search serving different data pertinent to that users status. Florists once logged in can post to any shops listing, rate shops on 5 star on ebay esque system, create a favorite florists list, edit their listing anytime and much more

The IPFlorist zip code search is a very advanced search we have developed to give very accurate results. It is a GEOSearch where we rely on latitude and longitude of your shop in relation to destination, search by address will give absolute closest returns

The IPFlorist Website is a Global Resource for Florists

Any Real Florist can enter their shop, if not yet there, or assume their listing and make changes.

Basic listings are always free.


IPFlorist Phase 2
Summer 2009 we hope to roll out phase 2 of IPFLorist

This will allow florist to connect to one another online with no software to load to local PC, allowing transfer of orders at

YOUR terms between florists. We will also have a standard basis web site for each florist and the ability to tie in your own to your listing.

With phase 2 of IPflorist.com we will also US and Canada order online and order goes direct to florist at 100%. We believe our model will be very successful!

Florist Association Web Sites

We produce very effective Florist Association WebSites and will Make them available to your bonafide association at affordable rates

These sites can do virtually anything you could possibly need for your florist state or local florist association, all online, we set the sites up to serve the needs of the association for one, in one site and the public, in another, all administered from one screen we even have automated membership renewals, PDF publications upload to the site, online shopping with sales to your members, rotating member spotlight, and much more - call phillip for more info 612-588-1800 We have a site running here shopminnesotaflorists.com

Phillip Murphy
Crystal Lake Floral
Orchids By Murphy
ezflowerShop
Ipflorist
612-588-1800