Thanks Boss,
RJD, I would consider having the shop contact the sender directly for those consumers wanting an answer to delivery confirmation. Of course there are things to consider, How much time goes by from the time we pass along the consumers info? Will the shop actively advertise to this consumer in the future? I think so, I don't mind that, as long as they didn't sell us down the river, I can live with good clean competition, but not bad mouthing.
Of course I would have to study the analyze the long term effects doing things this way. I am open to any suggestions on how florists would prefer to work with my new company.
I am curious to see how many productive suggestions I get back, now that someone is finally asking for them.
Thanks,
Aron
Aron,
A little devil's advocate here, please don't take offense to anything.
If someone goes to Google and searches for "florist butler pa", their intent is to find me, not you. I'm a florist in Butler, you're not. I'm not sure what your marketing strategy is, but I can assume it will involve SEO and targeted pages for major and minor cities. That puts you in direct competition with the florists who directly serve those areas.
You're asking us to pay in one form or another to be listed on your website. This is either a direct payment to you, or you keeping a percentage of every order you harvest, or both. Through the miracle of high rankings and customer confusion, you'll harvest an order and pass it along to a florist your preferred list.
And your concern is that we might market to a customer you harvested from us? The nerve of us to provide information to someone who was looking for us in the first place!
What's there to like for florists who aren't on your preferred list? (for full disclosure to everyone who's not Aron, we were on the florist.com preferred list before he sold the company, so I assume we'll be in the select group when the new one launches).
And Boss, why MAS or FAS only? Why not work with FloristWare to tap into the ordering system? Mark is amenable to things like this, and fully capable. There's no reason to be exclusionary.
My honest feeling is this--you don't know what the customer's relationship is with the recipient. You don't know if this is a one-time purchase (sympathy from a business), infrequent (birthday), or a frequent (monthly) purchase. Granted, you can infer from card messages and tracking data as time goes on, but really, in the end, you're looking for orders, and your definition of a relationship is repeat orders. However, our definition of a relationship is knowing the preferences of the family members, their colors, what ribbons they liked. There's no database you can design that can replace the kind of knowledge we have (and I know because I do that for a living).
In the end, the only equitable way to treat a customer is to be a middleman for relationships, not a middleman for orders. It's not as likely to be as profitable for you, but it makes you more valuable to consumers, and that will bring a decent reward of its own.
So, if you're planning on being a middleman for orders, what makes you different?
Devilish enough?
