Background
First, we should give some background about Florist Business sector; the local florist is a brick and mortar
business generally owned by one or more individuals who live in or near to
their community, the florist raises
or sell flowers and ornamental plants plus other complementary services. The
florist can be privately owned or can be established as a corporation. A local
florist employs professional designers, managers, sales staff, assistants and
delivery people, who also generally live and work in their community. There are
some famous florist chains and many other individual florists across the
country; most florists are family owned and operated and all aspects of the
business are supervised closely by the owner or manager which could mean a good
quality service.
A local florist fulfills and delivers any order made by a
client. The florist can receive an order via a retail consumer that walks in,
phones in or receive the orders
which are placed through the florist’s E-Commerce website, a wire
service or an order gathered.
The florist designs and creates flower arrangements, ordered by the client, and
delivers it to the intended recipients. The local florist provides valuable
services, and friendly advice about flowers. The local florist is very valuable
because he is familiar with the local hospitals, businesses, nursing homes,
funeral homes, and the streets in the communities where the local florist is located. Florists, answer
questions, solve problems and deliver the service that a client wants and needs
when ordering floral arrangements.
After more than 90 years of delivering flowers and floral arrangements to different cities and
towns other than
the sender’s city, the direct transaction and operation between the florists, have not developed and evolved to an
efficient and effective business service for them; instead, an alternative was created; where
an intermediary actor worked
as a bridge between the Originating Florist
(OF) and the fulfilling florist (FF). This alternative is commonly known as a Wire
Service who gets a commission and profit for their services.
Almost all florists (brick and mortar florist, and pure online
florist) are members of a wire service company. Being a member of a florists' wire service
company allows a local florist
to send and receive orders across the nation while receiving a
commission. If a customer wanted
to send flowers to a relative on the other side of the nation, they usually had
to go to their local flower shop to have this done. The local originating
flower shop would then send the order to a delivering filling florist, and both
florists would receive a commission for the order. This has helped the growth
of the florist industry.
As aforementioned earlier, for more than 90 years, wire services
have been membership organizations where a retail florist in one area can
contact a member florist in another area and transmit flower orders for his
customers. The largest wire services are FTD Inc., Teleflora and BloomNet®.
Wiring flower
orders from one city to another has grown into an industry of millions
of dollars; but membership to a florist wire service network has not been free
for a local florist; In addition to the regular cost and expenses (payroll,
rent, leasing, internet etc) of the brick and mortar florist store, the national wire services also collect
substantial fees from florists for a wide range of services such as Monthly Membership, Monthly E-Commerce Site Hosting
and Admin, Monthly Network Access/Usage Fees, a monthly portion of Semi-Annual
Dues, Monthly Toll Free Listing Fees, Monthly Network Quality Fees, Monthly
Florist Directory Listings Fees, Monthly 4 extra City Listings Fees,
Monthly 4 Zip Codes Listings Fees, system upgrades. Also there are variable
costs associated with
a membership in a wire service, costs such as Cost of incoming E-Commerce orders, cost
per order, handling
fee/charge, relay fee/charge, merchandise from the wire service or
services they may belong
to, etc.
When the internet grew in popularity, pure online flower companies, started to use
the wire service as a method to efficiently, collect many orders and send them
to brick and mortar florist across the nation. Currently, due to the high competition and the
high profit margins that can be earned by simply gathering orders and passing
them onto a wire service, more and more unscrupulous marketing firms are
popping up using deceiving marketing methods like fictitious websites where the
consumer is fooled into thinking that they are dealing with a real local brick
and mortar florist,
only to learn the hard way when their order doesn't get delivered or what they
ordered is not what the recipient receives, that’s
when they realize, they have been
dealing with someone who
probably does not know the difference between a rose and a carnation and is not
a florist at all (customer order filling representative).
Now the Order gathers is another link added to
the chain. They do not have big
cost of installations inventories equipment, multiple branches and locations, etc. They gather information from their home or office, from where they fulfill representatives take and
prepare orders, that’s it. They
forward the client order to a wire service or to a local retail florist
for fulfillment. For their part, the Order Gathers (OG) retain a significant portion of the money
that a customer paid for the
flowers, leaving the local
florist with little ability to operate his business in a profitable
manner. On the other hand, the wire services had started to compete against order gathers
and their
direct members, brick and mortar florist stores since 2003; the wire services created
a sophisticated website,
flowers clubs and institutional services that attract customers to their sites,
those clients that otherwise should go to local florist. These real sceneries are against the
local florist, plus high fees and cost of wire services, the aforementioned
situation, among others factors, helped to create a declining margin of profits
for local brick and mortar florist.
On
the fallowing posts, we are going to see different Florist Business Methods:
A. Traditional wire
service method.
B.
Alternative Wire Service method.
C. Order Gather (OG) using wire
services.
D. Order Gather (OG) using filling
florist.
E. Wire Service Order
Gather (WSOG).
F. Direct Shipping.
G. Direct Florist to
Florist.
H. Direct order.
