Jenifer,
You raise some good questions and you have done your homework on your numbers but can I ask if you know how many more orders come in on the phone from your website? That should be a consideration too, as many people will first look at my website and then call in what they want.
For me, when I went to Strider, I dropped my fsn website but still keep them for sending out orders and it is a pretty good link to my website, too. I think it is $300 annually so really not much more than most of the paid listings for flower shops.
Do you have extra city listings? I have found that there are not a whole lot of people who want to send flowers to West Saint Paul, which of course is what I'm listed as. Even people who DO want to send flowers to my city will shorten it to St. Paul or even Minneapolis. That broadens the competition by a couple hundred florists instead of a handful.
I get a very minimal amount of orders from fsn, average one or two per month. I use it purely for the sending capability and the link to my site. I also get really very few orders on my own site, honestly I'm lucky if I get more than five in a month. HOWEVER, I probably get another 40 or so who call and order after looking at my site. I got an order for $300 because a lady looked at 30 other sites and even called some of those florists before she called me. If you stay with fsn, you MUST make yourself appear "different" than all of the other sites.
I very seldom receive orders from other florists, possibly because I don't go after that. I want people to call or order directly from me, we really do need to eliminate as many middlemen as possible in order to be profitable and spend our marketing dollars where they will do the most for us.
I don't know about the favored florist in the neighboring town or what ftd has to do with the bank. She must be trying to do some refinancing and so she's all about making paper look good. That should have no bearing on your decisions. None. That is why every florist needs to make their decisions based on their own resources and what "angle" they are approaching to do the best thing for their business. If she feels that a favored position with her bank is what she needs right now, that is what will drive everything she does.
So you need to figure out what it is you expect from a website and if that is more orders, you're probably barking up the wrong tree. If you don't already have your own domain, get that immediately. You can then re-direct it to your fsn site. It can take quite some time for google to start archiving it but at least you will have started the process while you make your decision. I kept both for six months until I was really sure that strider was the way for me to go because it does cost more money and more of your time unless you take the option of letting strider do it all. That costs even more.
I'm trying my best not to sway you in any direction, you need to weigh what your objectives are and then put your efforts toward that. I will give you my reasons as best I can for my decision.
In 2003, I "built" a 10 page website using a godaddy template. It was pretty, it was different than all of the others, but it had no e-commerce. So in 2006 I "built" a shopping cart. That was a disaster. It didn't show up very good at all in searches, and figuring out the shipping was a major pita. I ended up disabling it after a year. In the meantime, I had signed up with fsn, and I liked that a lot. I did not have a website with them, just a listing. When I disabled my own shopping cart, I decided to get an fsn site. It did what I wanted it to do, which was to gather orders for me to fill locally. Most people called after looking at the site.
In January of 2008, I signed up with Bloomnet. I somehow got sucked into the idea that they would increase my revenue. They did increase my total sales, and if I were in the market for financing, I would still be with them because that can be made to look good on paper. November of 2008, I signed up for their (bloomnet's) website. I did not surrender my site address to them, I instead purchased another and then redirected my address to that one. In December, I dropped it. Complete waste of money. And in January 2009, I completely dropped them and went with a Strider site with fsn as my sending.
There are a lot of options out there and the perfect fit is not a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. The one thing that I will say is that fsn is not a wire service, it's not an order-gatherer. They don't do all of the aggressive marketing that these others do. That is were strider comes into the picture for me. I've tried the others and they don't do what I want from them. With strider, it's up to me to do any marketing, in any way I see fit. If I want to market aggressively, strider gives me that opportunity. They don't do it for me, that's up to me. The wire services do a lot of aggressive marketing although much of it these days is geared more toward direct shipping than it is to driving traffic to local florist members.
God, I hope this is making some sort of sense to you. Just give it some time to percolate and figure out what it is you want to achieve. In the meantime, most definitely buy a domain name, strider or godaddy, they are cheap cheap cheap. You can even get a hosted site for really cheap so that you can get a blog, you would be amazed at how fast google will archive that. And then put a link or tab that redirects to your fsn site. It depends on when your renewal is, mine was not until June, so I had time to decide, the initial investment for strider to build my template site was not much, and then just the monthly fee for hosting with no contract. I would hazard a guess that you would see an increase of incoming orders but of course there is an increase in expense, too.
Don't leap if you can take one step at a time. Does that help at all?
