It isn’t your birthday or Christmas — but here are some free gifts for your flower business.

These 10 Free Services are surprisingly good and useful, in some cases even better than the paid versions.

Free Marketing Tools for Florists
Still spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on Yellow Pages? If marketing is important to your business, social media offer free, powerful ways to communicate with your customers. It isn’t just Facebook anymore — every business be managing their social media. Twitter is a great way to communicate with your customers without being intrusive. And Tumblr.com lets you create a blog instantly in minutes. Before you spend a dime on Google advertising or other online ads, make sure you’re using free marketing.

The Un-Microsoft Office for Florists
Google Docs (docs.google.com) offers free knock-offs of Word, Excel, and Power Point — as good or even better than the expensive Microsoft originals. You can upload and read any Micorosoft documents on Google, and easily share documents with other people. How to take advantage? When you’re buying your next computer, go for the version without Microsoft Office — you can save hundreds of dollars.

Free Communication Tools for Florists
Still paying for phone calls? Cut down on costs by using Google Talk (http://www.google.com/talk/) — Google lets you make free computer-to-computer calls forever — and computer-to-phone within the US for free through 2011. Skype (www.skype.com) is a good alternative to free calling also. All you need is a microphone for your computer. At Floranext we haven’t paid for a phone call in well over a year. Join the revolution (and stick it to the telcos!).

Free Email Tools for Florists
Web email has been free since Hotmail — but Gmail let’s you do much more than plain old web mail. Search your mail instantly, save gigabytes of storage, and send emails from multiple accounts right from your Gmail. It’s worth making the switch to free, smart web-based email.

Free Photo Tools for Florists
With all that marketing you will be doing online, you’re going to need to upload pictures. Photoshop costs hundreds of dollars — but you can get some great photo editing tools online for — you guessed it — $0.00! Picasa is the reigning champion of photo editing. At Floranext, we love Picknik (http://www.picnik.com/) for easy, no-download photo editing.

What other free online services are you using to save money and grow your business? Let us know!

image via pixabay.com

Teleflora™ just updated its product catalog.

Great you think? Fantastic new seasonal photos for my florist website, great new products for my customers? Well think again.

Teleflora™ updated its product catalog and is now charging its member $399 each plus $14.99 per month for ongoing updates — total $580 next year for new cost.

In addition, florists need to buy new containers, adding additional cost! If we assume conservatively that florists stock half of the 11 new containers, that they need to buy them by the dozen, and that the vases cost $3 above a plain vanilla container — that’s an additional $180 in container cost per florist over the next year, bringing the grand total to $760 Teleflora will charge the average member florist!

So let’s do some quick math.  Teleflora’s™ website says they have 18,000 florists. If the average florist pays $760 next year — that’s $13.6 million they will make next year alone from rolling out a product catalog!

That’s $13.6 million dollars Teleflora™ will earn for work that cost them maybe $100,000! In retail terms, that’s a 13,600% markup on the company’s $100k investment — this is an insult to retail florists who have built Teleflora™’s business.

In what other industry is it possible for providers to mark up their products more than 13,000%? This is Wikipedia’s description of a monopoly — sound familiar?

In economics, a monopoly exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it. Monopolies are thus characterised by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide and a lack of viable substitute goods. The verb “monopolise” refers to the process by which a firm gains persistently greater market share than what is expected under perfect competition.

In other words, this is yet another updated, refreshed version of Monopoly™: The Flower Shop Edition. And where is that $13.6 million going? Advertising Teleflora’s brand, not yours.

Retail florists can take back control from the wire services. Call your Teleflora™ rep and tell him what you think about their monopoly behavior. And start thinking about independent ways to market your business without the wire services.

The future of retail Point of Sale is here and it’s square.

image via google.com

Right now retailers need fancy cash registers and point of sale systems. But what if your flower shop could charge a customer just using your mobile phone? Square is doing exactly that — add a simple device to your iPhone and you can charge customers’ credit cards (without credit cards, with great, flexible rates).

Image via google.com

Keep an eye on Square — think about how your flower shop can get more flexible and start saving on non-cash transactions.

image via pixabay.com

 

FTD will start offering flower sites to funeral homes — how bad is this news for the retail florist?

FTD’s partnership with the largest provider of funeral home websites will allow them to immediately gain thousands of new customers. That means more sympathy buyers going to FTD, fewer going to local florists. And FTD can easily drop-shop sympathy products, cutting out the retail florist entirely.

FTD Florists to Benefit from New Online Sympathy Program for Funeral Homes

A Partnership with Funeral Homes Located in the U.S. and Canada Will
Drive More Orders to FTD Florists.

FTD has entered into an exclusive agreement with Batesville Casket
Company, the leading provider of caskets, cremation products and funeral
home websites, to provide customized, co-branded floral websites to
licensed funeral homes in the United States and Canada.
“This program represents a unique and innovative opportunity for both
FTD and the funeral service industry. FTD will provide a nationwide
system for ordering sympathy arrangements to a market that has not
always enjoyed a consistent, quality, branded experience,” said Rob
Apatoff, President of FTD Group, Inc. “Thousands of funeral homes and
their customers can benefit from easy, online access to a full range of
beautiful arrangements designed and delivered by FTD’s nationwide
network of artisan florists, and supported by its quality customer
service.”

The new program is available exclusively to funeral homes that utilize
Batesville’s WebLink(tm) websites. Participating funeral homes will
receive a co-branded floral website, custom-designed and hosted by FTD,
which prominently displays the funeral home’s name and brand. Consumers
can easily access the new floral website to place orders through a link
on the existing funeral home website. Tailored for the funeral industry,
visitors can choose from a first-class assortment of FTD sympathy and
funeral arrangements and gifts including flowers, plants, sprays,
wreaths, gourmet foods, and gift baskets

Another reason to ask yourself why you’re buying your florist website and technology from your biggest competitor.

image via pixabay.com

Facebook announced today a new offering for retailers – “Facebook Deals”. Make no mistake, this will change the way people buy. And it should change the way the retail florist industry advertises.

Image via www.lexpansion.com

image via public domain.

Facebook’s social network allows people to friend one another, creating online versions of real-world social networks. The site is quickly changing the ease and speed with which friends can share with their contacts photos, personal updates, and likes/dislikes – particularly about companies and brands.

How does Facebook Deals work? Facebook users with mobile phones can “check in” when they go to a store. In exchange for this “check in” (which announces to all their hundreds of friends which store they are shopping at) they get a coupon from that store. So it’s a nice quid pro quo: customer gives store free advertising and in return they get some money off their purchase.

So is anyone really going to use this? Gap is giving away 10,000 free pairs of blue jeans to the first customers who check in to their stores. And when they run out of free pants, they’re going to give a 40% discount to customers.

Why is Gap investing so much in an untested advertising medium? They realize that a billboard or a yellow pages ad pales in comparison to a word of mouth ad from a friend. And that’s what they’re getting from Facebook – personalized recommendations from one friend, broadcast to hundreds of their friends.

If you don’t have a Facebook page – get one for your flower shop. Promote it on your florist website, for your phone-in customers, via email blasts and wherever else you can think of. And think hard about what deals and incentives you can offer to your customers to get them to promote you online and offline.

We surveyed a cross-section of florists from across the country about their advertising, online and offline. The results are in — and there are some surprises, particularly in the realm of online advertising. Why is this important? We think in lean times, it’s more important than ever for florists to be smart about attracting customers. Spend – but spend smarter — that’s our motto when it comes to advertising.

Our caveat with this online survey, our florist respondents are probably a bit more technically savvy than the average florist — most of our respondents have a Facebook page and a website. That said, the survey gives a good representation of how flower shop owners are approaching marketing.

Should you be cutting, increasing or holding your spending steady? Interestingly 44% of florists spend less than 5% of revenues on marketing. The percentage varies pretty widely across industries. According to Bloomberg Business, automakers spend 2.5% – 3.5% of revenues on marketing, Target spends 2% g, BestBuy 3%, and Macy’s more than 5%. But service businesses should consider upping that number, according to Bloomberg’s Steve McKee.

Take a look at our survey results and let us know what you think:

image via google.com

Floranext’s founders have been in the flower business for over 40 years, running one of the most successful florist retail enterprises in the country. We think you should be saving money on your florist website and getting more for your money!

We put up with wire service technology for too long before deciding we needed to build our own florist ecommerce tools.

Things that ticked us off about the wire service websites:

Cost – Sky-high costs for poor service.

Inflexible – Hard to change your site products, prices, look and feel

Boring (!) – Have you noticed that every florist’s wire service site looks exactly the same?!

We didn’t want to be buying florist ecommerce from two companies acting like monopolies. So we built our own ecommerce tools. And after mulling it over, we decided to share that with other florists, so that hopefully they can benefit from having a more independent ecommerce solution for their business.

What you get with Floranext’s Florist Websites:

Affordable Website – different packages with different features, depending on your budget

Flexible – add your own products, change prices, change the site design in seconds

Self-managed – no hassel to run your site – Autopilot™ lets you set up your site once per year and let it run itself

Marketing Tools – get the word out about your site, build traffic through Facebook, search engine optimized for Google

What you get with Floranext florist POS:

No New Hardware Needed – get a florist Point of Sale without any new hardware

Fast Setup – get a new florist POS system in a day, not weeks

Keep Your CC Terminal – don’t want to change your credit card processing? You don’t have to! Keep your existing Credit Card partner

Take Orders Faster – Managing orders by hand now? Speed up your phone and walk-in orders faster with Floranext’s florist POS.

Are you buying services from a huge corporation when you could be buying from a small business like your own, with your intersts and your businesses success in mind? Contact us for more information today!