Did you suspend your Mercury or Dove?

[dolores dinyon]

we shut down our system at noon on friday. sales were up +20% from last year, which surprised us. we still took orders from any florist that called us on the phone. too many of the incoming were from tfhq for small $ and not worth it to us...especially with no delivery allowance. customers browsing our website called their order in.
we have a very small space to work in and get slammed on the holidays. iwe place a priority on having plenty of selection for our regular and walk-in customers. as an aside, we always put out wine, cheese, snacks, coffee and sample of our homemade truffles for the busy holidays. customers really appreciate it and it takes the sting out of their wait.
our order value was up this year. we kept a close eye on store traffic and only saw 4 customers leave empty handed from thursday thru sat evening. we were closed on sunday.
can anyone tell me if they received a significant amount of tf or bloomlink orders on/for sunday delivery? we have never opened that day due to exhaustion. thx.

 

[Flowerchatter03]

"can anyone tell me if they received a significant amount of tf or bloomlink orders on/for sunday delivery? we have never opened that day due to exhaustion."

The past 2 years, we have decided to be open for our local customers on Sunday for about 4 hours. We only took deliveries in our specific town of Cross Lanes and we did not take any deliveries on the outlying areas.

I can tell you that we received many calls from bloomlink and the order gatherers for Sunday deliveries, which we declined.

On Sunday, my business partner and I were the only ones working so there was no way we were going to be able to handle those other deliveries.

Also, on a side note, Sunday can be a difficult time to deliver. People go to church, take their moms to lunch, etc. It can be extremely hard to find people home. The orders we took for Sunday delivery, we asked the sender if they could be left by the door, etc. It is normally our policy to NEVER leave arrangements, however, for Mother's Day, you will surely hear about it if Mom doesn't get her flowers.

I'm am certain that if we would have told Bloomlink and TF that we were taking Sunday deliveries, we would have probably gotten at least 50. We got several orders Mon, Tues, and Wed after MD for MD arrangements.