Flowershopnetwork

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I get the same pretty charts and graphs. I certainly question the accuracy of their numbers!!! They are an ok service, but I haven't gotten the web traffic I had hoped to get from them. I do not think I will resign up with them in the spring. Luckily, it wasn't too expensive on an experiment (not the "Lexus" cost like some other things I've tried).
 
I'm going to step out on a limb here...

To me the obvious difference in traffic is whether or not you have a FSN website. I don't think you can expect to get the traffic from them if you have your own site or FTD's or Teleflora's.

I've tracked my hits and a large # of them are bots. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think any site is immune to spider bots.

As I said our website is with them (one time fee), plus our yearly membership. Bloomz, I'd like to know where your friend came up with $1000 fees. Ours doesn't come close to that.

I'll toot their horn all day long - my FSN website generates lots and lots of business for me. Have asked others what they get from their FTD sites - too many florists just don't know. jenny
 
Talking strictly directories:

I actually have an ongoing experiment with two directories, FlowerShopNetwork and Locate-a-Flower shop. I have a free delivery promo code on both ads, so it's very easy to track the conversions, especially for phone orders. I average approx. 2 orders per month from people who found me on the flowershopnetwork and about 6 orders per month from people who found me on locate a flower shop. (not very overwhelming numbers)

Locate a flower shop is about half the price, so I would say in my case, it's the better deal. I think a lot of it has to do with pertinent keyword rankings. Perhaps Locate a flower shop ranks better than flowershopnetwork for customers searching for a San Diego or La Jolla Florist. But maybe flowershopnetwork ranks better in other cities.

I think ilocalflorist directory is a good value, some of you may want to check it out.
 
Toot Toot

I'm going out on that limb with Mona and I'll toot their horn too.
I am PERFECTLY happy with them and I AM getting orders from the website. I know this because people are asking for the arrangements they see on the site. I've had all of 2 problems with orders that I've sent through them in the almost 2 years that I've been with them.

I don't get a lot of incoming orders, but I think that reason has been covered in this thread. The other florists who are memebers of FSN and TF, FTD, etc do their sending through the other WS. I don't belong to the other service(s) so I'm not going to get the orders that you send. I would take them... GRACIOUSLY, but I'm not going to mess with all the problems that come with the other WS. I'll take other FLORIST orders but I'm not filling those ridiculous OG and web orders that I KNOW cost the customer a lot more than TF is offering me to fill it. I'm choosing not to associate my shop with their Bull.
I hope FSN will continue to grow with some more good members.

Kim
 
When I compare bounce rates between the two dirrectories I see a 19% bounce rate for locateaflowershop comapred to the 29% bounce rate wth flowershopnetwork.

Locateaflowershop sends us 85% new visitors while Flowershopnetwork sends us 42% new visitors.

I would say some fudging going with them. The more I dig into our stats the more I see traffic coming from same sources on flowershopnetwork.

Both directories are affordable but when you start comparing the cost per visit things look pretty bad when it comes to flowershopnetwork.

At the rate things are going all directories will no longer be cost effective including yellowpage directories. We will continue to see the cost of getting new customers a ever incresing problem unless your website does well with natural results from the search engines. I see the need for these directories continuing to decline and I predict that their days are numbered.

I really think the internet will have problems ahead and that we will see another .com bust when it comes to advertizing.
 
CHR said:
But without the *do follow* directory links, a lot of locals would land lower in the SERPs or off the pages of Local/Maps. Those directories can give solid, trusted, on-topic signals of 'the real deal'.

There's more value in a good link than just the traffic it brings.
Click to expand...
Interesting, then, that Locate uses a 302 redirect, and FSN uses a 301.

Changes the value perspective a bit, especially with Google starting to rank the sources of 302s (again).

Ryan
 
FSN is bringing me customers with my website, being user friendly clients love it ! New updates and the arrangements are nice. We now have the option of adding our own images and personalizing our web site. I get automated phone advising me of an online order until I go online to pick it up , my email campaign is working . No hidden fees.
I feel for the money they really put forth the effort. I will find the Lifetime TV broadcast from last week and post . They focused awareness on the OG problem and using your local florist.
 
Rhonda when you go to the FSN site, you are required to type in the city and state you are trying to send flowers to. Once you've done that, a list of FSN shop names comes up. If you look at the FSN page, there is no place for a consumer to buy flowers. All traffic goes to flowershops. Not an OG in my book.
 
I agree with the value of passing the PR juice. But how do you place value on just that?

Also if we are talking about that we also have the problem with the paid link clause with Google. So a site that links to yours if its being paid for doesn’t count.

Many of these directories use some type of redirect and that just doesn’t help.

I think the most frustrating part about advertising online today is when you have a customer that wants to talk to someone about the quality of the link or traffic. The sales personal has no idea what you are talking about and won't have a clue how to deal with your problem or request.

You can say well you just lost a customer but they just don't care.
 
We have been with FlowerShopNetwork for about 4 years now, and it has been a very profitable partnership for us. We have never subscribed to a wire service since the beginning and have managed to grow our business without it.

We have used this service in a couple of different ways over the past few years:

First, we didn't have a good website, so I shut it down and re-directed our domain, www.dragonflyflowers.com to www.myfsn.com/dragonflyflowers. This allowed us to use DragonflyFlowers.com for all of our internet advertising and create our own brand.

(If you host your domain with them, you can have re-direct to the myfsn site)

Second, I learned more about SEO and realized that we needed a better performing web site to get into better placement in search engines, so we developed our new web site and blog that is optimized to drive traffic to the FSN ordering site.

Some great things about FSN:

They provide a great web site product / ecommerce tool for a shop that has limited resources for building their own web site. Our yearly fees are paid in a few days.

The pictures and product are great, and they have a great feel for what products should be displayed at different times of the year. (the owner used to be a florist, and I believe they worked with some local shops to get their pics)

We estimate that 75-80% of our call in business comes from FSN web site.

FSN President TV interview about wire services and order gatherers.

Some drawbacks of FSN:

We have not seen a great amount of relay orders from them, as they use an algorithm to choose shops based on outgoing orders. (But we never really considered them a WS resource in the first place)

Sometimes, during holidays, they can put up some very expensive items on the first page, we believe limiting our online orders.

You need to do your own SEO to make the site effective. Frames and lack of real content on the site make this very difficult for SEO. (I suggest having your own content site that that sends them to FSN for ordering)

Our example: http://www.dragonflyflowers.com

Overall Rating:

9/10 for a florist that needs a web site for low cost.
3/10 as a relay service.

If everyone dropped their existing WS and went to the FSN platform or something like it, local florists would rule the internet.
 
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After learning a little more about relays and WS....

duanermb said:
Overall Rating:

9/10 for a florist that needs a web site for low cost.
3/10 as a relay service.

If everyone dropped their existing WS and went to the FSN platform or something like it, local florists would rule the internet.
Click to expand...

I still maintain my comment from above, about ruling the internet, but I would like to qualify the relay service part. I think that FSN is the perfect resource for those who wish to drop wire service web sites and go on their own with low cost etc.

To qualify the relay comment a little better, I think it should be said that because everyone is using OTHER relay services, it limits the ability of FSN to become big in that area.

I am positive that FSN people are using the web site from FSN but still using other WS for relay, causing the problem.

FSN is definitely better in this regard, and that is what I wanted to qualify.

I have said on other posts, though, that WS are outdated, and what will really be a "service" to your local customers is to provide wires for free. (It has never been a part of our business, so we don't miss it, but our customers view it as a service that we provide - ie. don't pay extra money for that, "you can find a local florist yourself".)

Just my humble opinion. (Its your local flowers customers that drive your business - let me know if you disagree)

The issue I see here is that florists don't like wire services, but still view the outgoing wires as income. Pretend you never had that income, now what would you do for your customers?
 
I disagree - I like wire services and think they provide a good service I can provide my customers.

And I make money from them.

always the contrarian I guess...
 
Hey JB...

log on to FSN and look at the great info for Beaverton

See why I refuse to play?

most of their "Shops" are not even within 20 miles, the #1 listed had a fake address to be listed first,
Its become a pile of **it" used to be decent but has deteriorated to crap.

As a matter of fact find the first listed shop in the FSN directory. I have never heard of them, If you know them let me know.

I am just tired of the huge amount of BS in all of these supposed "directories"!!

If they want respect (spell it) then police yourselves, they have not as of yet.

tired of the words,
Keith
 
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keith said:
log on to FSN and look at the great info for Beaverton

See why I refuse to play?

most of their "Shops" are not even within 20 miles,
Keith
Click to expand...
Same thing's happening in the WS network too Keith... like in my city, I am the only electronic endpoint that FTD has (temporarily) and they send their orders to two other shops one 18 miles and the other 27 miles away...and these idiots deliver here...

Look at your Edirectory millage lists... it's amazing...
 
All of this info is so timely for me....I'm trying to figure out ways to help the new owner of the shop I sold to SAVE money and increase sales. I know, my husband keeps telling me "LET IT GO! You're NOT the owner anymore" but I can't stop caring...

Anyway, 'our' shop has been THE flowershop in our small town, Summerland (pop. 12,000 +/-) - Summerland Flowers & Gifts for those of you sending to Summerland, BC :) - for over 25 years. Other shops have come and gone....

Teleflora and I guess (AFS before that? before my time) has been the main wire service for sending and receiving orders. Our town is about a 15 min drive to a bigger town, Penticton (pop. 40,000+/-) with a lot of flowershops (last count: 5, with one, Art Knapps Plantland, the being the biggest player). When I took over the shop in 2004, the main problem I had was the suspicion that a lot of incoming orders were going to Penticton shops instead of coming to Summerland through FTD. So, as an experiment I joined FTD and lo and behold my suspicion was right! The orders coming in from FTD offset the orders going out from Teleflora and then some.

The other, real concern I had is that the prior to joining FTD orders coming in to our community (potentially MY customers) had someone else's stamp on the cards. Lots of people in my town shop in Penticton because my town doesn't have ANY big box stores, which is more of a concern now that the economy has taken a dive. More people are going 'to town' to shop for everything from groceries to tires, even though these emenities are right here in our own community.

I joined FTD in 2005 and found that belonging to both wires wasn't costing me really anything. So, I began considering dropping both wires (xincoming-xoutgoing = 0) and either 1. using a credit card for outgoing, or 2. joining an alternative network for outgoing.

Then I was thrown another curveball: a shop from Penticton opened a second shop in Summerland. Great! They are on TF so I felt that I couldn't drop that WS. I expected this shop to fold, as did other flowershop owners in Penticton, within a year. Well, it's now two years later and not only are they still here but this summer they expanded their strip mall shop (mine is/has always been on Main St and their presence has not affected my solid customer base. BTW: they smoke cigarettes in the back of their shop and have three HUGE labs tromping around in their store)! Now, this is/was a mediocre shop in Penticton and in fact they closed their 'flagship' store in Penticton THE WEEK PRIOR to Mother's Day this year. The owners 'were' friendly with me as another shop owner BEFORE they came to town but now and I guess all along their goal, in their own words, was to "run me out of town" - paraphrasing.

So, my (our) dilemma is: should I stay or should I let go of the wires?

If the flower shop stays, the fees with both wires will continue to be a killer and both incoming and outgoing has dropped as a direct result of the economy, I believe. But, if I go, I'll be missing possibly a great deal of those incoming orders.

Reading about FSN (which I've been gathering info on) in this thread, regarding the lack of incoming orders, has me concerned. If the flower shop drops the wire, good-bye to incoming orders - they'll all go to Penticton shops since everyone is fighting for $s.

Thank you TOTO for reposting the Excel spreadsheet. I've been looking for that resource for the past 5 years!

Any suggestions anyone has on this would be greatly appreciated. It's just not so black and white in my mind....

Thanks in advance to ALL responses.

Dorothy
 
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