Flowers is in the top 10 most searched items on the net. Be there for those customers

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carol

carol

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Aug 15, 2003
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new hampshire
greensandthings.com
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NEW HAMPSHIRE
Hero said this on the other board


Flowers is in the top 10 most searched items on the net. Be there for those customers that are more savy that the rest of the shoppers on the net. HERO

And I think he is right.. There is no way I am ever going to have as catchey a name as 800-flowers or ftd.com.. but I can market to my local people using my good long-time reputation.. and that is the best way to compete.. and service my customers better than anyone else.. that means FIND OUT WHAT MY CUSTOMER'S WANT.. AND THEN GIVE IT TO THEM

I am not saying this is easy or simple.. only that it seems to be the best way to compete in today's volitale market.

Carol
 
Chasing the DOG TAIL?

There is no way a small florist can out chase a Tail of the PIT BULLS site.

I don't need to chase those tails nor should I. Someone has to fill the end of that tail and I know that this person is not on the receiving end.

I'm not @@@@@ing about them since I'm not part of that enabling system.
 
What I meant!

was.. that we as florists need to and can position our advertising etc to get these more savvy web users.. and these are the people that will probably make good customers.. good long term customers..
What I was trying to say is that we need to continue advertising but change the focus of that advertsing to reach the people that going to use us and quit @@@@@ing and spending $$ ontrying to get those that are into the .coms..
Not sure I am even saying this correctly now.. but I have spent a long time re-positioning who I advertise to and who I consider 'good' profitable customers.
 
I agree with the Oyster

As a small florist, I am not sure the Web will ever serve me in a profitable manner. The cost is high, to many gathers and Big Boxes out there and I am in an area where the Internet is still the inside of some fishing tackle.

I tried FTD's basic Florist-On-Line for 12 months and got 1 (ONE) order from it. I was linked to my local C of C, had my web site on my business cards, statements, yellow pages, news paper ads, etc., was on FTD site and could be found on several Google listings. That means I spent over $1,425 for one $60 order. Now I don't call that a satificatory advertising ratio.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think the Internet just may work for some of the gathers, but not for this small rural Kentucky Florist................

That's my two cents worth......... :soapbox:
 
Pretty much ditto Rod...we market to our local consumers without the web address, we don't want them to go to our website to do their ordering unless they are online late at night and think "Gee, guess I'll send honey some flowers tomorrow and I can do it right now instead of forgetting tomorrow" or our out of town customers who call us direct by looking at the site and then call to see if we can do the design they are looking at. Why should they pay a service charge (TEL or FTD sites) or sometimes inflated prices on those sites. Very small town, rural, over one hour from a small "city" by most standards. We show our web address in our local print ads and on some invoices. The direct orderers out of our area/state, they are given our web site for reference mostly. Although we have received few orders over our Teleflora site, we have had customers tell us "I'm looking at your website" and that helps both of us.
I am currently getting ready to get rid of Teleflora's (and them also) and market my other site set up by Brian Faucher of Floristboard.com.
It should be interesting to see what happens with that one when I really target my out of towners with the new site address.
It just peturbs me to key in my town name and find pages and pages of gatherers and misdirected hits on the internet. No policing anywhere for deception only police yourself to not fill for them.
 
It's funny, I know I would never order flowers from a web site yet I would order many other things. I don't know why this is so with me, but it seems so much easier just to call my local florist or a florist in the town I'm sending flowers to. On the other hand, if I'm looking for a book or a record, it seems so much easier to find it on line.
 
A web site is a place where people gets a name of a florist. It is like dialing 411. I am lucky to have two web sites that is very cost efficient. One thorugh a local guy and the other at www.a1florists.com by BBJ. I get more hits around holiday time, most people as soon as they have my toll free number that is how they communicate with me after. They will go to my web site to see what I offer than phone us.
Yes I agree when we click on florist and Elliot Lake, I don't comeup first but people are coming to realize that there is lots of order gatherer out there. THey come to realize they want to speak to a real florist in a real town instead of a call centre.
Working on changing this...
Luc
 
We have our site with A1 and we have e-commerce sites as well. We have found that at first our customers viewed the sites and then called us - now a lot are just ordering direct. Our order volumed doubled over the last year.

Audra
 
Hey BLUE MIKEY the "Oyster"....

gads, you gots thorns in your backside as a result of the wire services, don't you??
Many studies have been done, many results have been compiled, many opinions have been cast, and many shops have taken the "plunge" into the web of the wide world.
Now, YOU HAVE to learn flower "marketing" from a "global" perspective...instead of a few thousand town folks, and you'd be VERY SURPRISED to learn that the way WE see ourselves as flower marketers, is NOT NECESSARILY, the world sees us as, and in EACH, of our direct consumer interactions, it only makes sense, to enable them to shop for flowers at YOUR STORE, by "offering" your store(s) products and services for THEIR CONVENIENCE...not yours!!
Even though FTD was the FIRST to offer a major template for it's members on the web, it DOESN'T make sense to use THEIR webs sites, at YOUR expense, when YOUR site address, is a SUB ADDRESS of theirs.
Florists are typically lazy...want someone else to do the leg work while "they" wait for that ever elusive order to "pop up" on their Merc/Doves/Other.
Present yourself as a BIG shop, to a big audience, and your orders WILL INCREASE, as reported by Audra.
IF you "choose" not to particpate in the WWW, your mortgage and credit cards MUST BE paid off or something, OR, you prefer NOT to grow your business if that's what you want!
The web, is MUCH CHEAPER, than sending out flyers, newspaper advertising, YP's, or radio/tv, BUT, remember that, when YOU are asleep, someone is looking for YOUR product....
Mike
 
So Mike, if they infamous 80-20-rebates were not there, would you still be at the same web-model for your business as you talk today? An awful lot of florists and non-florists are banking on that bribe money staying with a broken down model of an industry. I personally feel that FTD is going to raise the bar soooo high for the average florist, and TF will have to follow suit, that it will be almost impossible to keep playing the GAME.
 
As a side note, it should be said that our e-commerce sites are wire service based but we don't rely on them to pull people to us. We have a main shop page that I maintain that has links to our e-commerce options. We plaster that main page address EVERYWHERE we can.

Audra
 
A florist from a small town can definitely benefit from a web site.

If you're not on the web, the orders will simply just go to a site that advertises your city (and then wires the order to you.)

No, the orders won't just pour in the door. It will take time for search engines to find your site and you'll need to invest advertising dollars via one or more of the florist directories.

Wire-service hosted web sites are as good as you make them. For non-techie types like me, these products are a perfect fit. You have lots of choices and very high levels of customization available. Unfortunately, very few florists even bother to write a decent 'About Us" page.

My best advice is to include products that are special to your shop - items that make it look distinctive and different. Mix in some great "off-the-shelf" images and away you go!

I'm not sure how anyone asserts that 'flowers' is a top keyword in search, however.

FTR, here are the top results from Google: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html and Yahoo!: http://buzz.yahoo.com/
 
Here's what bothers me about the internet...

Yes, we all know that the internet probably holds a big future for some businesses, but let's look at something.

In the beginning. there were a couple of professional order gathering companies tht were using the internet to gather orders. They were attached to one of the wire services or maybe both. They decided not to "fight it out" in the yellow pages or mail stuffers. Theywere just going to use the internet.

As time went on, more and more companies saw the portential. 1-800 decided to expand from just yellow pages, some large florists also saw the advantages of order gathering and finally FTD had to do it to cut down on rebates paid. TF created their own way.

Please remember in the beginning before all this, if a customer wanted to send flowers to Aunt Mary in another town, the customer called or visited the local florist, placed an order and florist A sent an order to florist B for delivery.Florist B was given this order for approximately 73% of the value.

In comes the order gathers on the internet and now some of customers are using them to send their orders instead of the local florists. Yet the receiving florists are still getting approximately 73% of the value of the order. Add to the fact now that not only do you have independent companies from outside our industry being order gathers, but also other florists and the wire services themselves have become order gathers. Yet the receiveing florist still gets approximately 73% of the value of the order.

So now we have the call for every florist to revolt an "get on the internet" and "compete with these companies" and "don't let them steal your customers". So some florists choice to have the wire service create and maintain their website and continue to pay monthly dues to subsidize all the order gathering that is going on. "But these florist respond that these are full value orders and we are fighting back". If you pay $60 a month for the website and you pay $3.95 for each order processed through the system and if the average order is $50 and you average less than 6 orders a month, the result is orders giving you approximately 73% of the value of the order. So instead of a customer calling his or her local florist and having them send an order, we have gone through all this and most florists still end up with a received order valued at 73%. And this is progress?

If you owned a local hot dog stand, you would not have to worry about the internet. If your owned a barber shop, you would not have to worry about the internet. If you owned a carpet store, you wouldn't have to worry about the internet. There are hundreds of other businesses that do not have to worry about the internet UNLESS they want tell the local consumers more about their business and services offered. There is a good reason why they don't worry. If you lived in Detroit, what good would it be to find a barber in Chicago

If the internet is such a great new source of full value business, why doesn't everyone who now has a website, immediately drop all their wire services and focus all the new found money on your INDEPENDENT hosted website and concentrate on all these new full value customers which will easily replace all those discounted orders currently be sent to them and the order gatherers will eventually disappear and the florists will have even more direct full value customers??

To some of us, it looks like most florists are merely replacing one type of discounted order with another type of dsicounted orders and paying even more to do it. Just my opinion about the pluses and minuses of the internet.
 
Griff -

What if the wire services WANTED to get more orders to florists direct but the florists only supported companies that paid the biggest rebates, not those that brought them 100% orders.

Well...that's what basically caused the demise of the FTD florist-owned association. This is not a new story... short-term thinking on both the part of florists and wire services.

One of those companies currently directs all orders from .com directly to florists at 100% the product value. That seems very fair for a 'brokerage' of product....much fairer than 73%. (I know it's not perfect but it's darn well better than any of the other models.)

Where would most shops be without all those pretty images which cost a furtune to create?

The fee to receive a TF-hosted site order is $1.95, not 3.95. About half of the orders a shop receives via their site are on the phone (and frankly, our site does a better job of up-selling than does some of my staff. LOL)

I am in the middle of a couple projects and don't have the time to go into lots of details right now on my thoughts on this issue....

IMO wire service tools can be used as a great benefit. They are not evil incarnate.
 
I agree

Griff is great with numbers but as they say accountants can justify anything.. I use FTD's larger site and I get a good response. of course I have my own domain name not a subname of ftd. but a lot of business comesin byphone with the comment that that they saw such & so on the web andthey want us to deliver or ftd it..
is it cheap??no ..I do spend alot on advertising..and I do watch tosee if I get value for the money spent?? yup. it ain;t easy owning a flower shop in todays;s business climate.. but I like it.. a challenge I guess I started this thread because i am tired of florist bellyaching about the .coms and 800 flowers.. there is NOTHING i can do to change them.. I can only make my business decisions to accept or not their orders andthen promote ME to as many customers as possible.. and I do..
I am pretty deep into techonolgy because that is how I can do this.. and I am into productivity results.. I live in rural NH so it is not like I have a large customer base..I need to keep as many people as I can because we just don't have that many people in NH to sell to.
so my game plan is to sell more often to my customers.. and it does work.. A woman called today after looking at my site.. she had ordered one other time.. this time somehow she got a pop up from 800flowers for that rose deal at $29.999 and she wanted to send it out of state.. She kept saying it was on my site and I kept saying it was probably a pop up from some other site she was surfing.. and I explained a little about how the FILLING FLORIST was the one to set the price not ME.. well she surfed again and called again..and finally placed the order with us to send out of state BECAUSE she trusted US not some other internet florist.. that is what I am trying to get at.. we need to market ourselves as the professionals, trustworthy etc.. not just give up and accept the dubious fact that we can only be FILLING FLORISTS
sorry to be so wordy but maybe this is clearer??
 
I thing you folks forgot about MEBMBERSHIP FEES?

You folks can debate this issue all you want but everytime someone breaks down the costs of WEB no-one remembers the Monthly cost of Membership fees just to say HEY I'm on the WEB!
Or how about container costs when one chooses to buy them or Technology fees within the system and use a Dove system or Merc direct or whatever sending system makes your life simple.

I, like Griff have broken down EVERYTHING in OPERATING COSTS within a system that everone claims to be the cream of the corn. I find no-one remembering what the initial costs are before they say that WS.CON(YOURNAME HERE) is a start for them.

David Coverdale(White Snake)was in a band that the top song was "Here I go again on my own". It meant about his relationship about his love life with his Woman...well? I'm sure it cost him dearly in FEES when all was said and done and that is the message folks.....

You need to look at EVERTHING in your costs before looking at the subcosts.
 
Griff said:
So now we have the call for every florist to revolt an "get on the internet" and "compete with these companies" and "don't let them steal your customers". So some florists choice to have the wire service create and maintain their website and continue to pay monthly dues to subsidize all the order gathering that is going on. "But these florist respond that these are full value orders and we are fighting back". If you pay $60 a month for the website and you pay $3.95 for each order processed through the system and if the average order is $50 and you average less than 6 orders a month, the result is orders giving you approximately 73% of the value of the order. So instead of a customer calling his or her local florist and having them send an order, we have gone through all this and most florists still end up with a received order valued at 73%. And this is progress?
Click to expand...

Griff,

By your logic, every order generated by advertising would be a discounted order. In our town, a small add in a useless little local paper is min $250. That's more than I spend on web hosting for a year. So, even if this cheap add in a useless paper generated $1000 in sales, wouldn't they be 75% sales in reality?

What's the solution? Quit advertising? That's what gave the OGs such a market in the first place - they advertise better than most florists. Advertising is a cost of doing business - just like paying for a web site. The only true 100% sales are the people who walk in your door ... but wait, you spent money to set up a window display, right? Not 100% in that case either ....

Ryan
 
The web will replace our wire services in terms of send orders across the country over the next 5 years in my opion. Florist need to invest in proper technology and in advertiseing both in print and on the web. Florist in this country have created most of thier problems by being poor business managers and to cheap to spend any money. If you micro manage every penny you spend you will never take the marketing risk required to grow your business and to survive. Any business that stays the same will die over time and that is a fact. We get several orders a day off the web and far more orders actually come into us via phone while they are looking at our web site.

If you are not a leader and you are not a follower then the only option that will be left for you is the third option of getting out of the way as the world passes you by :hammer:
 
Griff,
You can get those 100% orders if you have your own web site, not from a wire service. People now days are realizing what is happening on the web and are more cautious than before. They read and they make sure where the order is going to.
Some will even not bother ordering on line and phone to make sure.
We won't be able to eliminate all the bad sites on the web. As soon as 1 is shot down, another one starts right away. All we can do is EDUCATE the public as much as we can. And if we can see a chance to make a 100% sale with a call in or inquiry we all should jump at it.
One step at a time....
Luc
 
larger companies have CEOs and CFOs but since the majority of florist are relatively small one person does all functions from marketing to accounting. In the corporate world CFOs are never in charge of sales or marketing. Because it goes against there personalities. The CFO is not a risk taker, everything needs an exact return on investment or he/she will not do it. A company can not grow with that approach so sales and marketing are normally headed up by a risk taker.

There are four type of personalities ( analizer, supporter, promoter and controler) we all have a primary personality and a secondary personality. I would suggest to you that the majority of florist that are doing well in this country are owned by a person with a promoter personality. and if its not there primary personality its at lease their secondary personality. CFOs are most likely to have a analizer personality.
 
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