I don't mean to be condescending but I am going to try again to make a point here.
Many of us say "people would rather talk to a human" and in my experience that faction is less than 30%. Many say "I get 4 phone calls to 1" online type of orders, and assume that is the percentage of consumers that PREFER the telephone, but this means, if I can do some math here, that they should be getting over 2 online to each phone order, that they are losing ...oh hell I can't do math like Griffman can, but try again, if you take 4 on the phone you most likely didn't get the 2X that that you should get, and those other 5 customers who want flowers in your town still bought, but most likely went on to FTD or 800 or someone who has a well studied well flowing compelling website. So Bill help me out, how many orders did you lose to the big boys?
It's SO easy on the web to go to another store, you don't even have to start the engine. And if your orders are only 20% online you lost I think that would be around 50% of the customers you could have had.
So you can't REALLY judge how many people order online from your own experience of how many onlines vs phone orders. (Neither can I really, but I know 70% is attainable cuz I do it) I really bet that 800 and ftd is (guessing now) closer to 90% online, cuz they are better at this than we can hope to be. (How many florists do you know of that had their website rebuilt for $4 million then dumped the whole concept and went back to what they had - yes FTD did this a few years back (remember that black background one they had for a couple weeks a few years ago?)
So again, if you are not getting more online orders than phone orders that is a function of your website, not the customers preferences. People are now quite comfortable using credit cards on the web, why else would ecommerce be growing by the billions? I've seen many websites that are almost a brochure site with clunky online ordering that of course people call in, the faction that is smart enough to look for a local florist. But contrary to popular floristboard flowerchat opinion, I don't REALLY think that is growing that much. I have been VERY easy to find for my city for many years and had a basically functional website for a while now, and I know that, since it gets harder every day to find real local florists anything I can do to make it easier only offsets the toughness of finding local florists, and hopefully keeps them from going to the bigdotcons.
I'm not slighting florist directories like Mlou's (I am a member) but I really do think that even those customers are a very small percentage of internet floral buyers. Only a couple of those directories are even findable. (Mlous being one of the two) (side trip - I got a call today from flowershopnetwork today, they wanted $250 _ I told them it was questionable to me if it was worth $100 but I would give them that for 1 year - they declined. I love these days telling advertisers what I think their product is worth, it's the only way to fly) I've blown enough on internet advertising to know that about 90% of it doesn't work, no matter what they tell you.
Hope I said all that right.
If you're not getting 2 online orders to one phone call or better, you can do better. Somebody else is. Those other people are still buying flowers, just not from you directly. Best of luck with it, it's a huge study with a constantly moving target.
It's taken me about 7 years of staying up every night until midnite to learn what little I know, only to have it all change in a couple months.
I got a 100% the second time. I chose the opposite of what the word said, since it is easier to choose the other answer from what the word is than consentrate on the colors.
