Local Florists or Order Gatherers

It's around this time of year when people send beautiful flowers as gifts to moms, dads, and grads. Inevitably, the purchaser will be faced with a decision: from where do these flowers come?

In general, the purchaser is presented with two options: local florists or order gatherers.

Local florists, like The Black Opal Florist are real, brick and mortar stores that service the area's floral needs. They are courteous and professional, and pride themselves on the quality of their work.

Then...you have the order gatherers. Order gatherers take orders from customers, then route them to local florists for fulfillment. They often present themselves as brick and mortars, some of them even show up on Google Maps, but the truth is, they are not.

So, then, the question becomes, where should YOU do your shopping? Let's take a look and see!

Suppose you're buying Mother's Day flowers for your mom, whom you love very much, and you'd like to spend about $50 on the flowers. If you go through a local florist, an $8 delivery fee might be assessed, and the remaining $42 would go into the beautiful, high quality arrangement. In other words, you're getting your money's worth. But what about our friends the order gatherers? Well, it's rather a different picture. Say we have that same $50 to spend on flowers. First we'll deduct the $8 delivery fee from whatever local florist the piece gets routed to. But it doesn't stop there. The order gatherer needs their share as well! They deduct a service fee in the range of $20 from the money you put towards the piece. As a result, you're now spending $50 but only getting $22 worth of flowers!

The choice is clear: buy local and the quality and pricing will reflect the care put into these businesses! This Mother's Day, make the smart buy.

Back to Blogs