| There's no doubt
that every year it is becoming more difficult to keep one's
head above water in the flower industry. Today we face
competition from the major grocery and gasoline chains as
well as Wal-Mart who are open 7 days a week for long hours
every day.
It's even tougher recently since FTD has been including the
major chains into its client base. There's no way the small
flower shop can compete head-to-head with the giants in
hours of service or price. The hope of attracting orders
from other communities has been fraught with difficulties.
First, there are so many different providers of this service
that a small shop cannot afford to use all of them, and to
keep costs and confusion down, you must settle on one
provider or at most two. Secondly, there are high
costs associated with most popular providers. The
flower shop that initially sends the order takes a healthy
cut of the price, and of course the provider takes a "small"
fee for facilitating the order. By the time you get
the order, the lion's share of the profit is gone.
But it doesn't stop there. There are also monthly
fees for providers, as well as their advertising costs, so
that the order sender can pick a shop to make and deliver the order.
But one has to keep up with the advertising or lose out in
the competition to get orders. I recently saw one
extreme situation where the only florist in a small town was
listed last for her community because larger shops in
other communities were outbidding her in advertising.
Even if there is affordable equality in advertising, the sad
truth is that if there are ten florists in a community, then
the average florist there can, on average, only expect one
tenth of the orders that come from the provider's service.
Unless the provider is able to capture ALL out-of-town
business, the result is a trickle of orders coming to the
flower shop.
One solution is to have a better, high traffic, location
in your community. But the owners of high-traffic
locations know the value of their property's location, and
raise their rents and selling prices accordingly.
Again there are significant costs associated with getting
additional business.
But now, Aquilifer is able to offer a relatively low cost
way to generate flower orders from out-of-town sources using
a system that has been proven in practice for the last 4
years. Those four years have demonstrated that our
plan is a real money-maker for the florist who takes
advantage of it. Basically we are offering to lease
you a website that has your company's name, address, and
telephone numbers on it, at a very reasonable cost.
How are we able to perform the seemingly impossible?
We achieve this feat by sharing the internal structure of
the website with other communities, and customizing the names,
addresses, phone numbers, comments and prices for each
client. All websites have built-in processes and
instructions so that you can change any price at your
convenience as well as add or remove comments to any or all
pages. You are in control of the key features of your
website. By this plan the high development costs of a
modern website are shared with other florists from other
communities who are not really competing with you.
Does a florist in Toronto compete with one in Montreal or
Halifax? I think not. In this way we can keep
the costs reasonable and you can reap the benefits of
significantly higher flowers orders. There is one problem
with this plan. In order to achieve maximum profits,
you must be the first in your community to sign up for this
plan. This is not a sales gimmick. It's the
straight goods, because of the way the Internet works.
The first person in your community who signs onto this plan
will reap the lion's share of Internet orders from that
community. I'm sure you've heard of EBay and Amazon,
but do you know the name of the second Internet auction
site, or second Internet bookstore? Neither do I.
All things being equal, flower shoppers will click on the
first name on the search page. That's were we intend
to put our clients.
For more details, Click Here |
