Flowers? Aren't there, like, a million flower shops online? What makes yours different?

Recently we had a customer send flowers to a friend because her house had been burglarized. Another person sent a "sorry you got pregnant" bouquet. And then there are the oddball card messages like "Dear Patty, I am so sorry! I watched too many old movies.

Please forgive your loving but stupid father." Occasionally we get orders with card messages that are "too hot to handle" so we have to ask the customer for permission to re-word their passionate sentiments.

I always have a sense that the two biggest days for florists are Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. Is that true, and if so, what % increase over normal orders do you see?

Mother's Day is the biggest flower holiday, and Valentine's Day comes in next, with Christmas and Easter running a distant third and fourth. Generally order volume is 4-5x higher than usual during the week prior to those top two flower holidays.

Somewhere I remember reading that there's a specific code that dictates what color roses you should send someone and what type of flower you should send for different occasions.

We have a Meanings of Rose Colors page which many people take with a grain of salt. But people should be aware that sending red roses is likely to be interpreted as a romantic gesture.

Men who want to send roses to a new female acquaintance might be well advised to start with yellow or pink, and work their way up to red as the relationship blossoms. Aside from roses, the only other flowers that are typically occasion-specific are daisies for get-well and gladiolus for sympathy

Percentage of orders are Internet-based

We've had a retail presence since before we started the website. But since Don Belveder Florist had its origins in a local florist shop, over 90% of our business is online. I think from a customer service perspective, it's very helpful to have experience in the retail floral trade, working face-to-face with customers.

You come to understand what they want and expect when sending flowers, and you put a more human face on dealing with problems.

How do those telefloral companies actually work? Do you get your orders via secure server? Encrypted email? Fax?

Most florists are members of the FTD and/or Teleflora networks like
CentralFlowers. These "wire services" help members find a local florist to prepare and deliver the order, and they also act as a financial clearinghouse. So instead of paying hundreds of local florists who fill our orders, we pay FTD on a monthly basis, and they pay the individual florists who actually arrange and deliver the flowers.

The sending florist keeps 20% of the order total, the filling florist gets 73% and FTD takes a 7% cut to administer the program.

We run all the credit cards. FTD and Teleflora are highly competitive with each other, so they offer incentives to retain members. One of the incentives FTD offers is a 0% discount rate on credit card processing.

They act as our merchant bank and credit card processor, so we pay only a 30 cent transaction fee.

Here's the process flow: We take our orders and process customer credit cards via a secure server. Then we query the FTD member database online to find a filling florist and transmit the order data over a secure web link to FTD's central server. FTD transmits the order to the filling florist's computer, via TCP/IP, dialup or voice, depending on the technology available on the receiving end.

We do have the option of finding a filling florist in a 4-inch thick FTD member directory and phoning the order to them, but that's not taking advantage of automation and technology!

What about FTD, don't they dictate prices

FTD has a suggested retail price for most bouquets, and each florist has a workbook which tells them how many stems of each flower to use, the type of container, etc. But wholesale flower prices vary by region, time of year, and phase of the moon.

The reality is that the SRP's for most of the FTD products are higher than most florists would charge for that (or a similar) item in their store, so florists almost never balk at taking an order for a few dollars less.

Also, we charge $3 less than FTD's (very high) $10.99 "service charge", which we can afford because we don't have FTD's massive overhead costs

The next time you send a $50 bouquet to your mother, the sending florist gets $10, the florist who actually makes and delivers the floral arrangement gets $36.50 and FTD itself gets $3.50?

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