Case Study: Arena Flowers achieves reliable, scalable order notifications with Amazon SES

Arena Flowers - Customer Case Study

Arena Flowers is a UK‑based online florist and gift retailer that outgrew its hosted infrastructure as traffic and partner integrations increased. The company faced extreme seasonal spikes (up to 2000% around Valentine’s and Mother’s Day, jumping from about 2,500 to 50,000 orders per day), limited scalability with fixed servers, and a need for reliable customer and operational communications — for which it deployed Amazon SES for all email services, including error handling, staff alerts, and customer order notifications.

By migrating to AWS and using Amazon SES for email, Arena Flowers split applications across scalable instances and improved reliability during peak periods. Amazon SES handled transactional and operational messaging while the AWS stack (EC2, Amazon RDS, S3, etc.) delivered on-demand capacity; the result was faster deployments, the ability to fulfill massive holiday spikes, and a measurable 30% annual saving on hosting costs. Amazon SES played a key role in keeping customers informed and staff alerted during high‑volume events.

Arena Flowers

Sam Barton

Chief Technology Officer