Stats- Independant vs Wire service website

[clay]

I have my independant site and a wire service site from when they "convinced" me the web orders they would bring to me. I went to check the stats for Feb 1st thru 25th to see what it looked like as far as activity, and this is what comes up. Interesting....($60.00 + tax) + ($2.95 x 1)= around $68 for the one order "they brought me".

 

[BamaE4U]

Doesn't that just mean

that your custom site is much easier to find? And since you would be competing against yourself, you are doing a much better job than TF. If there wasn't such an excellent site out there competing against the TF site, it would have done a little better.

Our TF site had 25 orders with $78 avg. I don't know how others did.

 

[CHR]

Clay -

Hmmmmm.... let me guess which one you optimize, update and promote.

With stats like that, why are you paying for that TF template at a base rate of $720 annually? (oooops - looks like you got if for free) Did they throw in the listing upgrade for free, too? (normally $300/year) You probably already know this but the easiest thing to do would be to take down the site and request a redirect to your main URL. Of course, if it's free, there' no rush. :>

If you do, then TF will probably put one of those 'free' storefronts back up with your shop name on it on findaflorist.com - unless you request they completely omit your company from the directory.

 

[sfox]

Why Would You Ever

Why you would ever have a wire service website?

Everyone on the floristboards @@@@@ about how the wire services are screwing florists, how over priced the wire services charge for belonging, how much money everyone loses filling wire in orders. THEN GUESS WHAT, IT'S THOSE SAME FLORISTS WHO BUY A WIRE SERVICE WEBSITE!

Forget about what it costs for a wire service website, forget about all this crap they say about they maintain your website. The real reason not to have a wire service website is that you are giving them access to the customer information of who is buying flowers from your website.

Both FTD and Teleflora are marketing direct to the consumer. Both are trying to get customer to order off their .COM websites. Florists @@@@@ about how wire services are trying to steal their business, and then they have a website with a wire service. This gives that wire service data as to who they should be marketing to.

Why should they spend millions on advertising to the general public, when they can spend millions marketing to flower buying consumers who have already bought flowers from florists.

 

[BamaE4U]

You Might be a FWOAC if. . . . . .

You have a Wire Service Website!

I confess I don't have a clue . . . . . I have been taken to the woodshed.
If I spent half as much time on building my own website as I spend on Flowerchat. . . . .hmmmm.
Is this place addicting or what?????????????

 

[clay]

The reason for me.

Why you would ever have a wire service website?

Everyone on the floristboards @@@@@ about how the wire services are screwing florists, how over priced the wire services charge for belonging, how much money everyone loses filling wire in orders. THEN GUESS WHAT, IT'S THOSE SAME FLORISTS WHO BUY A WIRE SERVICE WEBSITE!

Forget about what it costs for a wire service website, forget about all this crap they say about they maintain your website. The real reason not to have a wire service website is that you are giving them access to the customer information of who is buying flowers from your website.

Both FTD and Teleflora are marketing direct to the consumer. Both are trying to get customer to order off their .COM websites. Florists @@@@@ about how wire services are trying to steal their business, and then they have a website with a wire service. This gives that wire service data as to who they should be marketing to.

Why should they spend millions on advertising to the general public, when they can spend millions marketing to flower buying consumers who have already bought flowers from florists.

My reason was mainly for the stats. Since we have started offering the indepenant website program, WebsiteCP, to other florists that have asked us about it....cost (small monthly, no per order) and performance (stand alone and comparing against other floral websites). I will stop here, I do not want this to be taken as a sales pitch. May not be a good reason, but it is my reason.

BTW, I recieved almost exactly 100 orders for that time period that I did not pay a per order fee of $2 to $3, depending on whose website program you are comparing with.

 

[Eric S]

2004 was the last year we used our WS websites before creating our own in October 2004. Keep in mind we did promote all three websites the same and by February 2005 we had seen a change from recieveing the 15 orders a month from TF site and 1 to 5 orders from FTD site to 20 to 50 orders a month from the new indy site that had only been up for 5 months. The first three months hardly any activity from the new site (expected until SE indexed the site) . We have recently broke the 100 mark on the new site so for us we had really seen the change.

I would like to point out that our TF site did start doing much better once we started adding our images to it back in Aug 2004. I think a TF site really does have potential as long as it is promoted well and more of your own Images and SE Optimization is added. However the cost associated with it is to high.

Some things I noticed with the FTD site was that first of all never had its own page rank. I noticed that any type of FTD advertizing directed customers to a domain such as FTDonlineflorist/(yourshopsname).com and never the true domain name. Also the search engines never indexed the site very well so it was always third or fourth page back for what ever you where looking for.

One other thing I would like to mention is that the domain name that was used for the FTD site has been very difficult to get noticed in the SE unlike the TF domain that was used, immediatly recieved traffic. Don't know the reason perhaps someone could check into that.

My old TF domain is www.everydayflowersca.com
My old FTD domain is www.everydayflowersca.net

As of today I noticed that both of the domains are finally recieveing equal traffic and that has been one year later after the WS websites were closed.

Also I did a little check on the wayback machine for both of the sites and it was kinda cool to see how the websites looked compared to now.