Florists, are you marketing to the younger generations?

These days it may seem as though flowers are becoming a vintage luxury that only older generations seem to care about or can afford.

Currently, the trend among Millennials seems to be houseplants. Their charm is that they require little maintenance to thrive, a tempting proposition for people who live busy and fast-paced lives. 

The virtual spaces that we now inhabit changes the landscape of living, requiring businesses of all kinds to quickly adapt their products and marketing strategies. If you haven’t, it’s time to begin thinking of ways for your business to reach young people.

Image via Shutterstock

Keep an Online Presence

The touchstone of the Millennial generation is the Internet, enabling people to be connected wherever they may be in the world. This makes the Internet one of the best tools of communication, and of course, marketing. Knowing how to fully utilize the Internet to make an impact with your brand is fundamental to letting yourself be known to your target audience.

Image via Shutterstock

Engage With Social Media

Social media platforms are by far the most visited websites and tools in today’s society, and florists should take advantage of that traffic to bring attention to their brand. Although it is good to have an account with all the large social media platforms, the most critical are Instagram and Facebook. Their impressive support for images (which you should rely heavily on) and extensive ad programs make them the go-to for almost any business.

Your shop’s Facebook page is going to be the face of your business, so take your time tailoring the page’s picture and cover photo. For any other day, you can use a default design, but you can also utilize these photos when running campaigns or promos. Usually, the profile photo can be your logo.

The content of these profiles will be the most important. Whether it be on Facebook or Instagram, your posts should endeavor to tell a story. Millennials are loyal to brands they trust, and they trust brands that tell their stories.

Image via Shutterstock

Share Your Floral Knowledge

Millennials are DIYers and reliant on gathering information on the Internet, thus you should take this opportunity to consider putting up a blog, where you can teach people how to take care of flowers, content about which flowers can be useful for specific occasions, how-to/DIY guides, and much more. Putting up content is both a service to your customers and a boost to their loyalty to your brand (besides being good for your search engine ranking!). Once they find your content helpful and useful, they can learn to trust you over time.

A trend that you can also ride on nowadays is the do-it-yourself trend. People believe that when they can do it themselves, not only can they have potential savings, but they can also have the satisfaction of having done it themselves. In order for you to fully utilize this trend, you should have good DIY content, where you teach people how to set up flowers and maybe even teach them a few tricks in floral arrangements. For people who might be apprehensive in the DIY approach, give them a flexible option that lets you do it but still gives them control over the flowers. The key here is customization: give people a way to express themselves through the flowers, and try to give them more options to give more customization!

Build Florist-Customer Relationships

After gathering a following, you should engage with them! You should excel in customer support: dealing with errors in orders and delivering, helping provide information on the flowers, and even helping them out pick the right flowers for specific events. Going over and beyond, you should also learn to engage with your customers in the social media platforms. People appreciate replies to questions they ask about your service or product. 

Part of relating to them is talking with them when they share their own experiences. By encouraging people to share their own stories, then commending them and appreciating their effort, they are more likely to interact with your brand more, earning yourself a potential customer. Don’t force people to do so, though; let them come to you naturally so you can ensure that they will stay.

Through these interactions, you can also get feedback as to how to improve your products further. Letting them voice their opinions and recognizing them can be great in knowing how to make your service better for them.

Emphasize Convenience

Convenience is one of the millennials main focus when choosing or purchasing a product. Anything that could cause any brief delay will detour this generation in finding a competitor.

Just like in other industries, you might be also interested in setting up subscriptions and or loyalty programs. Subscriptions are perfect for the floral industry and can entice newcomers since they will be bound to be changed every so often. You can feature flowers every month and have them sent to everyone who subscribed, with complimentary brochures on how to take care of them, information on the flowers or advertisement of your upcoming events or classes.

Loyalty programs can be less effective than subscription, but they can help add more incentives to customers who frequent your place, which will keep them returning.

Marketing to Millennials and the younger generation may seem too much work, a pain, or even frustrating. However, simply following some of the recommended marketing tactics above can help increase a younger clientele and will help increase profits and allow your business to bloom in the future!

Florists, what are you doing to reach young people? Please share your comments below!

When will your flower shop be ready for the holidays? What month do you start preparing for the holidays? Which holiday is best for sales (hint, it’s Christmas). See the items most florists sell during the holidays and most-sought decorations and decorating services. Does your shop run an end-of-year sale?

In this age of technology, florists need to step up their design game to stand out from the competition. Below are some design resources for florists to help you brand your business.

As a florist, you have a good idea of what makes a beautiful floral arrangement, and how to communicate with types of flowers and their placement.

The next step is to achieve awareness of your floral brand. You need to look different, striking, and eye-catching to rake in these customers just like your floral arrangements. The question now is, how?

There are many options for graphic design out there, and fortunately he great thing about them is that you can go about it in many different ways, from DIY (Doing It Yourself) to hiring professionals to design your shop’s look. Here is a guide – a set of design resources for florists.

image via pexels

DIY Design Options for Florists

You should understand that doing the design yourself means more than just thinking of the design. You also need to know the technical skills required in using the tools and software needed to make the design. Luckily, these tools are getting easier to learn and use. 

Florist Graphic Design Tools

Design and photo editing software Adobe Photoshop is powerful but the user interface of the program can be overwhelming to first-time or inexperienced users. Thankfully, the Internet is bustling with easy graphic design software:

• Canva
• Piktochart
• Snappa

Image via Shutterstock

The upside of these sites is that they provide templates from which you can start building upon. There’s a huge array of choices available from their catalog, each designed for specific purposes and with modifiable text and/or images. These websites also provide extra graphics assets readily at your disposal. With a theme as flowers, you are sure to have a template or two ready to be edited!

The downside of these is that you have limited control over the assets; most of these websites do not have the full breadth and robust tools that something like Photoshop has. With a badly done design, this can be a disaster. However, you can do most of the work that you want to be done on these sites. Also, free members and guests might need to attribute the design to the website, with some watermark that you don’t want to have. These websites are great for simple work that can be done with a template, and they do it really well.

These websites usually offer these services in memberships, likely in two tiers, a free one and a premium one. Needless to say, free members get limited access to templates and assets, while premium members can access their entire library and even ask for professional help in the website.

image via pexels

Graphic Design Templates for Florists

If you are confident with your editing skills, you probably wouldn’t be here. However, if you are willing to expand your skill set, you can take a swing at learning Photoshop or Illustrator (a similar program, used to open most assets from design sites). You can actually get decent work done after a few YouTube tutorials or so.

Of course, Starting from scratch is a monumental task. You can take a look at several graphic design sites like Freepik and Creative Market and see some templates that you can modify. Graphical assets like icons are also readily available in these sites. You can download these files and modify them in the program, making it into the design you want.

This can be the most taxing option available, because of the nature of these programs that are aimed at professionals. Plus, just like the maker websites, you will need a premium membership to access all their assets. This option is certainly not for quick jobs, but if you want to really do it yourself, then you can just make it yourself.

Image via Shutterstock

Hiring Design Professionals for Your Floral Design Needs

In all honesty, we don’t have the luxury of time to actually do the design ourselves. Plus, the design can easily go horribly wrong in the hands of inexperienced users. Hiring professionals for graphic design services can be quite the number in your financial account, but for the sake of exposure and gaining customers, this can be a worthy exchange.

image via Shutterstock

Contracting a Graphic Designer for your Flower Shop

The easiest way to hire professionals is to go to a freelance website and scroll from the long list of freelancers willing to do your bidding in a heartbeat’s notice.

Consider using a freelance platform like:

• Upwork
• Fiverr
• Behance
• Dribbble

Upwork and Fiverr have a healthy population of freelance graphic designers that would jump at your job posting. Behance and Dribbble also have designer portfolios, though are harder to navigate. The positive thing about hiring freelance graphic designers is that the price can be relatively cheap, and you can state that they do not hold any rights to the work done.

However, revisions with freelancers are usually also paid, unless stated otherwise beforehand. You need to talk with your freelancer before getting the job done.

The first thing to look for in a freelancer is their portfolio. Freelancers usually have them posted in their profile, and you can also ask for samples during the interview phase. This helps you identify the right freelance graphic designer whose style that you prefer, although most professional designers should be able to do what you want to be done.

Because freelancers work in contracts, hiring them is great for designing quick things like posters for an upcoming promo. Turnaround times are also good because the competition in the market is rather tight. 

Image via Shutterstock

Hiring an Graphic Design Agency or Team for your Flower Shop

This is as professional as professional design can get. These teams offer packaged deals in graphic design, like getting a logo, poster templates, and business cards done for one payment. These deals are also usually very flexible, like letting you order just a logo, or letterheads and business cards. They also allow revisions of the design, in case you didn’t like the first designs.

Out of all the options presented, this one is the one that you can get the most professional designs from. With design teams, one person may be doing the design, but then passed on to another for quality checking in order to maintain a standard set by the team internally.

Well-established teams also have great customer support, in order to create a positive reputation around themselves. Having a design team make your creative works also makes any design to be done, with little to no effort at your side. Of course, this convenience may come at a high price. 

Design teams usually have a dedicated website, and you can easily scroll their portfolio to see if they are a great fit to your job. They are great for having work done about your brand, and they can produce design materials like templates that you can use for the future. Plus, you hold all rights of the designs, so you need not to worry about copyright. 

How to Work with a Designer? Florist Design Requirements

What do you need to be designed? For a field as varied and subjectively beautiful as design, you need to clearly delineate your requirements and express what you want to see in your design.

If you have a particular design in mind, clearly communicate this with your graphic designer:

• Write down a design brief explaining your business and what look and feel you are aiming for
• Find inspiration from the design work of other places.
• You can also do a rough sketch and present it to them.

The idea here is that you explicitly told them of what you expect from them; this helps build a clear understanding of your end-goals.

image via pexels

Floral Design Resources Summary

We hope our how-to guide on floral design resources was useful – there are lots of tools now to design it yourself or hire a professional. But more than ever, for the floral industry branding and design are at the heart of a businesses’ success!

Florists, what are some ways you use graphic design in your business and what options do you use? Please post your comments below!

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Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

Halloween is one of the top holidays for business retailers, with sales outperforming every holiday other than Christmas.

An ever-increasing number of individuals share in this fun occasion by spending millions of dollars per year on sweets, home decor, costumes, and more. Couldn’t florists take advantage of Halloween?

Is it because of lack of inspiration or interest, or is Halloween outside the brand? Not everything needs to be in black and white…or purple and orange!

Instagram is a great source of inspiration for some frightening floral arrangements that can generate some interest with customers while helping you stay true to your brand and style.

Arrangement and Image by @houselarsbuilt

Arrangement and Image by @myglendaleflorist

Arrangement and image by @bernsflowersandgifts

Arrangement and image by @violetrosefloral

Arrangement and image by @itsallarranged

Arrangement and image by @sallyrosestudio

Arrangement and image by @bloomandwild_de

arrangement and image by @kendallsflorist

Arrangement and Image by @houselarsbuilt

Arrangement and image by @nwaifdchapter

Florists, are you selling Halloween arrangements at your flower shop? Are you seeing an influx in sales during this holiday? Share your comments below!

Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

Add some Tricks and Treats to your flower sales with these spell-binding tips!

Halloween has gained serious recognition among business retailers and no wonder why, as adults look forward and partake in this fun holiday and are spending millions on the holiday.

It is said that Halloween sales surpass every holiday except Christmas. So why aren’t Florists cashing in on Halloween?  In this blog, we want to help floral businesses cash in on Halloween profits and establish long lasting  patrons.

image via wikipedia.com

Make A Ghoulish Flower Arrangement

Make a few creative, spine – chilling, Halloween flower arrangements and donate them to your local busy eateries, pubs, hair salons, and so on.

Think large crowds and make sure your business card is displayed and visible.

Many florists have participated in donating arrangements and it has paid off big time. The purpose here is to bring recognition to your flower shop business.

Tip: Donate an arrangement to the main office of your high school. Kids love these and will remember your flower shop when prom comes around. 

image via pixabay.com

Spooktacular Window Display

First impressions count! Be sure to make your window display or front entrance stand out and ooze with creativity. Getting patrons into your flower shop is key in increasing your profits.

Tip: Adding an enticing sign to your entrance will help bring traffic into your store, remember, everyone loves bargains incorporate these signs in the Halloween decor.

image via pixabay.com

Sell Halloween Hair – Raising Items

Think of carrying a few Halloween specific items in your store. Patrons flock for candles, Halloween baskets, soaps, lotions, and jewelry. Make a small display, preferably at the front counter near cash drawer. Create designer pumpkins with ribbon, wheat, and other fall items to create a centerpiece that will last through the fall season.

Tip: It’s great to include mums, hay, and pumpkins for sale, at your shop.  These items will allow your patrons to buy all they need from one location. 

image via pixabay.com

Be A Sales Warlock

Cold calling still works, if you are located near hotels, corporate businesses, and busy restaurants, pick up the phone and give them a ring.  Ask them if they would like a jaw-dropping Halloween arrangement for their lobby or front entrance, you will be surprised how great this works.

image via pixabay.com

Host a Spellbinding Flower Workshop

These are all the rage and create fun exciting pass times for your patrons. Remember the theme is Halloween. You can teach anything from a fun Halloween arrangement, like adding flowers to a pumpkin or even decorating a Halloween wreath.

These are buzz worthy, don’t forget to post on social media!

Thrill Customers On Your Website 

Make sure to update your floral website. Do not skip over Halloween, make sure to add some beautiful Halloween arrangements and items for sale.

How about also writing a Halloween blog? Offering your readers some creative tips for this festive holiday. This will help increase your SEO and make your eCommerce store recognizable across the internet. Be sure to add enough content and images. Remember,  Dia De Los Muertos is November 1st.

Flowers Mystify The Media

Involving the media is a sure way to get you and your flower shop recognized. There are many things you can offer on Halloween to get you recognized in the media.

If you are close to your local news channel, send them a beautiful creative flower arrangement.  Make sure to offer the arrangement to all the anchors and thank them for a job well done.  You are sure to get your flower shop and creative arrangements on the news.

Another way is get your schools involved, offer free arrangements for students who write the best essays, these can include why Halloween is their favorite holiday, someone they admire and so on.

Image purchased with license through dreamstime.com

Enchanted Costumes = Flower Sales 

If you are open on Halloween have everyone dress up. This may sound far-fetched, however, you will see an increase traffic into your store if everyone is participating. Have one of your  best -dressed employees stand out front your store throughout the  day preferably holding an enticing  sign.

Offer special discounts on single stem or bunched flowers for costumes or accessories for customer Halloween costumes.

These are just a few suggestions on how florists can tie Halloween into marketing and sales.  We would love to hear about your Halloween marketing and sales tips, please share with our readers below.

Florists, were you surprised by the results? How do you get your floral shop ready for the holidays? Please share your recommendations, feedback, or questions below in the comment section. 

Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

Mother’s Day is just around the corner, is your business ready for this busy floral holiday?

Having a decent plan in place to make the most revenue during Mother’s Day is fundamental in receiving every one of the rewards of this bustling blossoming occasion. In this blog, we will go over an agenda to help you during this Mother’s Day holiday.

1. Promote Your Floral Business!

Begin by using your Floral Website and Social Media sites to start marketing your floral arrangements and your business.

Images & Products

• • Post high-quality photos of your work or any specials you are offering during Mother’s Day on your website or Social Media platforms.
  • Don’t forget to link your social media posts to your website!
  • Mother’s Day products should be prominently displayed and easily accessible throughout your website.

Hours & Policies

• Clearly post your shop’s business hours on your website and social media.
• Having clear policies and return/substitution policy will alleviate any headaches for you and your customers.

Promotions & Discounts

• Increase traffic to your store by offering deals or discounts on pickups rather than deliveries.
• List special Promotions. This is a great way to encourage customers to shop early before Mother’s Day week.
• Don’t forget to update your product pricing to cover your costs.

Note: Promoting does not always have to mean discounts. Remind customers why they should order flowers through your business.

2. Staffing, Scheduling and Duties, Oh My!

Making sure you have enough coverage can be overwhelming during the holiday rush. Not to worry, take a deep breath and follow these great tips!

Hiring

• If hiring extra help, offer them a day to come in before Mother’s Day week to go over job responsibilities and training.
• If hiring extra drivers, discuss with them if you require them to use their own vehicle.
• If you can, keep a standby driver at the shop to handle new orders for delivery.

Employees

• Have an employee meeting and discuss what is expected of them during Mother’s Day
• Make sure to explain how important everyone shows up and does what is expected of them.
• Encourage and Praise your employees and floral designers. Its always better to be positive than negative.

Scheduling & Duties

• Have your Mother’s Day week schedule out two weeks in advance. That way there are no surprises to your staff and you have time to make adjustments.
• Go over job descriptions with employees as its always nice to have a reminder of what everyone’s responsibilities are.
• Assign sections for the delivery drivers in specific areas. Add finished flower arrangements to this area with the date of delivery that is bold and clear.

3. Don’t Forget your Flowers & Supplies

Making sure you have enough flowers and supplies to get through the holiday is important.

Supplies

• Start looking around for supplies, containers, baskets and vases weeks before Mother’s Day.
• Visit your local supplier. However, don’t forget to visit discount home stores and dollar stores. You can find some great unique items.
• Don’t settle! Shop around for the best deals on supplies and florals.

Flowers

• Start ordering your Mother’s Day flowers early to get the best value.
• Don’t forget to shop around if you buy from multiple wholesalers.
• If you are comfortable, get your flowers through a floral auction. A great opportunity to get some discounts when purchasing in large quantities.
• Make sure to order flowering plants, orchids, and dish gardens. These are big sellers and require very little work.

Note: if you are new to the floral industry, Mother’s Day spans for a week, not a day. So order enough flowers!

4. Start Prepping & Showcasing your Flowers!

Stay ahead of the game with these prepping and showcasing tips during the busy holiday rush.

Prepping

• Prep your flowers when they arrive.
• Teach your front of store staff how to wire flowers to help cut down the time.
• Cut any ribbon and make bows ahead of time
• Green any vases, baskets or containers.
• No wastefulness! With the abundant supplies and flowers in the shop, it is easy to get sidetracked and be super wasteful. Everything thrown on the floor that can be used should be. Wasting or throwing out even a good pin or wire is considered money out of your pocket. Please be sure to express this to your employees.

Showcasing

• Gather up all your add-ons and gift items and display them prominently in the store.
• Make sure you re-stock your impulse buys on your front counter to sell in addition to flower arrangements.
• Make sure your flower shop and displays are clean and have an inviting atmosphere.
• Remember if Employees have time to lean, they have time to clean!

Work Ahead

• Work a day ahead. Fill any orders for next day the day before. Working a day or two ahead will allow you flexibility just in case there are any last minute orders.
• Place pre-made orders in a cooler, well tagged with date of pick-up or delivery.
• Mark any time sensitive orders and bring those to the front of your cooler.

Note: It helps to have a system that works best for you. However, working on orders per day can feel overwhelming, so staying ahead of the game is always best.

5. Take Care of Yourself

It is important to take care of yourself during this busy Mother’s Day week.

• Wear comfortable clothes and shoes.It’s best not to wear open toe shoes as this can be an insurance liability in some areas.
• Make sure you eat! Breakfast, Lunch, and dinner are important—don’t skip meals!
• Get enough sleep. No one is at their best with lack of sleep.
• Take mandatory breaks.
• Do not sweat the small stuff. Regardless of how hard you try, there may be a complaint here or there. Do not let this get you down. It’s the nature of the business. The world can’t survive without florists!
• Try to enjoy Mother’s Day week by keeping a journal of all the funny things that happen or mishaps that take place to reflect on for next year.

Tip: Bring in extra shoes and store them in your cooler to remedy those aching feet. 

We would like to wish all florist a very successful Mother’s Day!

Florists, do you have any great Mother’s Days tips to share with our readers? Please post any of your Mother’s Day tips or feedback below.

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Floranext offers great florist software, florist POS, florist websites and florist wedding proposal software. Our florist technology products are built by florists, for florists. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

Vanity emails go a long way in branding your floral business.

But are they necessary? If you are still using AOL, Gmail or Yahoo as your business email you are missing out on opportunities to present your brand—as many opportunities as there are emails you send, in fact.

Image via Shutterstock

What is a Vanity Email?

Simply put, a vanity email is an email that includes your floral business/domain name. Generally, if you have a website domain name, you want to use your domain name in your vanity email, for example sales@flowershop.com instead of flowershop@yahoo.com. The typical structure is name@businessname.com.

You can set up a vanity email through your domain registrar.

Image via Shutterstock

Why Vanity Emails are a Crucial Addition to Your Flower Business

All your shop’s public personality feeds into your brand, and using a vanity email can help connect the dots from your website to your business communications. Your logo and website are important, but so is the way you project your brand with every communication.

1. Vanity emails help make your business memorable!

A vanity/business email helps to ingrain your business name with these recipients. Creating your email identity making you recognizable. Compare flowershop134@yahoo.com with owner@flowershop.com: which is more engaging, which is easier to remember? Every impression counts, even through email.

2. Vanity emails create assurance and trust!

Anyone can create a free email account, which can leave email recipients feeling vulnerable. Having a business vanity email helps in solidifying you as a professional business owner giving you/your flower business credibility. As a customer, you can be sure that the owner@flowershop.com address was created by the same people who control the flowershop.com website, and all messages you receive from that address are coming from a shop employee.

3. Vanity emails keeps emails organized!

The beauty of vanity emails is that you can create emails for different departments, such as sales@flowershop.com and info@flowershop.com. This will help give a clear direction to your customers on who handles specific email content. You will still have access to all these departments, but it will establish an organized response system.

4. Vanity emails are reasonably priced!

Besides these other important benefits, the cost of setting up a vanity email is almost negligible. Marketing/branding for your floral business comes in a lot of shapes and some options are very costly, but having a vanity email is worth every penny you spend. It is also easy to set up through your current domain provider.

Florists, do you have a vanity email? How have vanity emails changed your floral business? Please share your feedback and questions in the comment section below.

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Floranext offers great florist software, florist POS, florist websites and florist wedding proposal software. Our florist technology products are built by florists, for florists. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

If you don’t understand how secure websites work, you are not alone.

So what are HTTP and HTTPS websites? HTTP is short for hypertext transfer protocol, and HTTPS adds an S for secure: secure hypertext transfer protocol. Is your eCommerce website HTTP or HTTPS? And if you don’t know, how can you tell?

HTTPS uses a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to encrypt data transmitted over your website. SSL provides a coded encryption which scrambles the information into a series of random characters and once that information arrives at its destination—the other computer—it will unscramble itself and be readable again. The coded encryption is what keeps hackers from stealing sensitive information.

How Can You Tell if Your Floral Website is HTTPS?

When browsing the internet pay close attention to the websites you view and notice if they start with “http://” or “https://”. Click the information icon and it will show you a message just like in the image below.

The image below is taken from a secured website. It has https:// in its URL, and if you’re using the Chrome browser you’ll also see the word Secure next to the padlock icon.

Why HTTPS is a Must for Your Floral Website

Besides the security of customer data entered into your flower website, it is becoming mandatory on search engines.

• Security of Data. When you have an SSL certificate on your website, all information passed between the user’s browser and the website including passwords and credit cards can potentially be intercepted. HTTPS protects customer data.
• Customer confidence. With version 56 of Google Chrome released in 2017 any websites that require visitors to enter sensitive information will be marked as “Not Secure.” This is something your customers will notice immediately and can lower their confidence in ordering from your website.
• SEO. Studies have shown that secured websites have higher search engine rankings. 
• Website Load Times. HTTPS websites load faster, which also benefits your SEO.

Some unsecured websites that are HTTP look like this:

However, for some they already appear this way. This new warning is part of the long-term plan to distinguish pages from HTTP and let visitors know they are “Not secure.”

No doubt about it, HTTPS is and will be a requirement on all websites. Your customers deserve to shop with confidence and you owe it to your floral eCommerce to have a website that allows you to reach your fullest potential on search engines. Find out if your website is HTTP or HTTPS.

Florists, do you have any feedback or questions regarding HTTP and HTTPS websites? Please share in the comment section below.

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Floranext offers great florist software, florist POS, florist websites and florist wedding proposal software. Our florist technology products are built by florists, for florists. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here.

Have you worked hard to provide quality blooms and care to all your customers, only to be forced to compete with a floral order gatherer?

It can be frustrating and discouraging for florists who invest serious sweat equity into running a flower business only to see an eCommerce company to move in and pass themselves off as local florists.

There are many different kinds of floral order gathers, from the larger, well-known wire services to ones that take over search engines. We will focus on the floral order gatherers who run search engine ads that knowingly deceive their consumers, and offer you ways to maximize your sales and eCommerce legibility without worrying over order gatherers’ paid ads to lure customers into shopping with them under false pretenses.

Image via Shutterstock

What are Floral Order Gatherers?

Order gatherers—in this case, floral order gatherers—are virtual businesses that have no intention of filling the order purchased by its customers. What order gatherers essentially do is harvest the customer’s information and payment details and then look for real local florists to fulfill the order.

Order gatherers can benefit themselves and the filling flower shop alike, right? Well, yes and no. Order gatherers only pass along a fraction of the customer’s payment, and the customer gets less of what they actually paid for.

Floral order gatherers know that they profit by sending orders to a real local florist, while you the actual florist pay for mortgage/rent, utilities, employees, and product.

Another concern is that some order gatherers are passing themselves off as local florists when in actuality they do not run a flower shop or design flowers. You likely have seen their paid ads on search engines.

Below is an order gatherer’s paid ad on Google. (We covered the name of the order gatherer as well as their website address.) If you look at this ad you can see how easily a customers could believe this is a genuine San Diego florist. There is no indication that this company has nothing to do with fulfilling their order.

Image provided by Google

A Step in the Right Direction: There have been several lawsuits filed by florists to stop these order gatherers from blatantly falsifying information on their ads regarding their location.

Image via Shutterstock

How to Beat Floral Order Gatherers

So what can you do to stand apart from floral order gathers that are taking over your area with paid ads on search engines? Unfortunately, there is no surefire way to stop them other than educating your consumers and marketing your floral business in a way in which it is not affected.

We understand that is easier said than done, however there are a few points working in your favor: floral order gatherers’ time is limited, there are more and more articles out to help consumers identify order gatherers, and consumers are wary of paying more for something only to get less.

Take these actions to brand yourself and increase your visibility as a legitimate local florist in your area, that will offer customers exactly what they paid for.

1. Use a blog. If you have an option to add a blog to your floral website, do so and take an action on educating customers on what a real local florist offers versus a floral order gatherer. An article on your website on this topic will reach more people than visitors that just land on your web page. Besides discrediting order gatherers, this strategy will bolster consumer confidence in your floral eCommerce.
2. Add content and write-ups. Add a gallery and write-ups of your flower business’s staff to your website to showcase you as a local florist.
3. Consider your marketing. The advantage you have as a real local florist is that you do not have to spend a small fortune on ads that fundamentally deceive your customers you’re trying to attract. Market your flower business on social media consistently and be sure to ask satisfied customers to review your shop on Google and Yelp. The best way to do this is having links on your floral website to allow customers to easily click and review you.
4. Use store promotions and offers. Floral order gathers offer many enticing promotions to entice customers to click and shop—refer to the search engine add above, offering 45% savings. We do not want you to give your flower arrangements away from free, however, consider running some enticing offers to get customers to click on your website. This is a great option for gaining new customers as well.
5. Don’t forget about SEO. Your search engine optimization should be on point to compete with online businesses like order gatherers. Work with your floral website provider to make sure you are listing on the first page on search engines. Make sure your Google business page is set up and work on adding images and getting reviews. This all helpful in raising your site’s ranking on search engines.
6. Try a Google ad. Thanks to the internet, marketing is so different today than it has been in the past. That isn’t to say that mailers don’t work, but placing a Google AdWords ad can be helpful in building your brand visibility. Start off with a lower budget, see how your conversions go, and build up from there.

Image via Shutterstock

Floral order gatherers do not play fair. There is no way to stop them completely, however, florists do have the upper hand as floral order gatherers need filling florists to make their business possible. Partner up with other real local florists and stand up to the floral order gatherers by educating your consumers. We are not saying that no florist should ever fill a floral order gatherer’s order, but it’s about time that florists get compensated appropriately for their services. Do not hesitate to ask for more money if you are filling a gatherer’s order. Florists, your expertise and resources are needed to keep floral order gatherers in business—remember that.

Florists, how have floral order gatherers impacted your flower business? Please share your feedback in the comment section below. If you have any questions please post below as well!

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