Blogger Chris took FTD.com up on a offer he'd received via Netflix to purchase a Christmas arrangements for his wife. What he was sold:
What he got:
Chris said "I didn't know it was supposed to be DIY. I figured as much from the way it came in the box, but my wife--who hadn't seen the original misleading picture--assumed it was supposed to be like that. Couldn't find anything on FTD.com to suggest that, "Yeah, you're gonna have to do some work on these." "
Buyer beware. Despite what the US Better Business Bureau Code of Advertising says about unassembled merchandise
Unassembled Merchandise
When advertised merchandise requires partial or complete assembly by the purchaser, the advertising should disclose that fact, e.g., "unassembled," "partial assembly required."
flower drop shippers continue to advertise professionally designed 'arrangements' which require additional elements, tools & assembly by the recipient. Neither FTD nor its major drop ship competitors - ProFlowers, Calyx Flowers and 1-800-Flowers - clearly states on the product pages or in the ads that tools (knives or scissors) and assembly are required on the applicable products.
The BBB relies on the industry to "self-regulate in the public interest". Unfortunately, the industry leadership has remained mute on this issue. Self interest wins out over the public interest?
We believe this advertising is deceptive and misleading and puts real local florists at a competitive disadvantage. It's far easier to offer low prices when a large part of the expense - professional design and hand delivery in water - are omitted.
In Chris' case, it was a real annoyance to receive an 'assembly required' arrangement, but imagine the reaction and embarrasment when a purchaser sends one of these 'kits' to a funeral service where a bereaved family has to put it together - or to a hospital where a patient has to find tools to recut the flowers and make his/her own arrangement from a sick bed.
If you have been mislead by a similar ad, let the BBB know and take Chris' advice when purchasing flowers in the future: "Buy flowers locally. You know what you're getting, and you're likely supporting a local business."
This post is 4th in a series of articles about why your flowers don't look like the picture. See also:
Why Your Flowers Don't Look Like the Picture - Part 1
Why Your Flowers Don't Look Like the Picture - Part 2
Why Your Flowers Don't Look Like the Picture - Part 3
On Friday morning an alert San Diego FlowerChat member noticed that two of the Google Local Ten Pack listings for his city had abruptly changed. Instead of displaying the names and details of the real shops, Che Bella and Rosita’s Flower Shop, the listings sported ‘Convenient Flowers’ and ‘Amazing Flowers’ and the links pointed to URLs which then redirected (via affiliate links) to national floral affiliate reseller companies.
The hijacks were reported in Google’s Maps Group Spam Report thread.
Mike Blumenthal, of Understanding Google Maps and Yahoo Local Search spotted the posts and then gave me a ‘heads up’ on how the spammers did it:
1) They could only change unclaimed listings and did so via the ‘Edit’ links.
2) Some time in late August, under a variety of different user identities, the affiliate(s) began changing the names, addresses, phone numbers and URLs - and in some cases, adding user reviews which included the “new” business names. (The timeline and changes can be viewed on each listing via Google Maps by clicking on the company name, selecting ‘Edit’ in the pop-up balloon, and then clicking ‘View History’.)
The positions at or near the top of local search as well as the now stolen user reviews were preserved – but all of the traffic was directed to the affiliate links. Florists weren’t alerted by phone because most of the listed numbers had been changed.
The florists with whom I spoke did not realize their listings had been hijacked until the information had populated into Universal Search and was seen on the main Google search page.
One shop owner who tried to reclaim her listing was unable to get anywhere because she couldn’t validate by phone nor receive a postcard - since both the phone number and address had been changed.
The good news is that in some cases, by simply re-editing a listing and reverting the details back to the original information, the correct store details can be restored. (Although it will take time for the data to re-populate to the Ten Pack.)
But that hasn’t worked for everyone. Michael of Church Street Flowers was able to restore his domain name, but is still stuck with a bad phone number and the affiliate’s phony business name. He started the process of claiming his listing Friday afternoon so there may be a lock on the data at the moment. Four ‘users reviews’ for the phony florist were also added to his page, and that may complicate the name change as well.
My advice to anyone who got hijacked is to change back the data in the exact reverse order in which it was first changed. If it was modified over 3 or 4 steps, try doing the same in reverse. Once corrected, claim the listing immediately.
For more information about claiming local search listings read the Florist SEO Blog. Do it now or you business could be the next victim.
Since all these changes were made by hand, and not some bulk upload, finding and reverting them will be a tedious challenge. I’m hoping the Maps team will take a look at the user IDs and activity and give these florists any help they can.
Needless to say, Google’s method of allowing users to change legitimate company data is seriously flawed, but I ultimately hold the floral companies who offer incentives for this behavior - the resellers and the floral wire services – responsible. Their lack of enforcing their own Terms of Service makes all legitimate local florists prey, not partners.
Oddly enough, it was an affiliate of a 1-800-Flowers affiliate reseller that hijacked one of 1-800-Flowers' top franchisees, Veldkamp’s. Maybe this latest episode in deceptive wire service affiliates will finally be a wake-up call.
Want to look like an official, authoritative local florist while sitting behind your desk thousands of miles away? Just add the federal registered trademark symbol - ® - to your Google Adwords ad titles and viola! you can be local without bothering with rent, employees or any of that other costly local stuff.
Just in time from Valentine's Day, FlowersUSA.com, a web site owned and operated by FTD, has begun running ads targeting local searches for florists in communities across the US. The ads claim the company holds federal registered trademarks for an array of local names:
Today, a Google search for "Irvine Florist" shows:
A search for "Tempe florist" displays:
Because according to a 1800Flowers.com customer service rep, pink is out of season.
Blogger, the Trading Goddess, wanted to send pink flowers and ordered a "Florist Select European Hand Tied Bouquet", relying on the product photo to make her purchasing decision. (It displayed a mixed pink and white bouquet wrapped in pink paper.)
While the bouquet description mentions "Components will vary", it's hardly clear that the colors will be chosen by the delivering local florist, too.
The Trading Goddess summarizes the frustrating conversation with CSR 'Dora' during her complaint call to 1-800-Flowers:
"I told her how important the color pink was, and solely due to the photo on their website, was the reason I choose this bouquet. I told Dora that I would have purchased the larger bouquets if they had the pink pic that went along with the description, which it did not. There was only the "small" choice for the color pink.
Well, Dora repeatedly told me that the description says "Florist Select" and that means their choice of color. She repeatedly said that they choose from the flowers that are in season and that the pink was not in season."
The testy exchange between the shopper and CSR rep is reminiscent of other customer service run-arounds with 1800flowers.com.
I'm guessing that company will fix the product description to make is clear that color choice isn't an option, but they also need to work on training the CSR's to stop blaming customers and giving out lame excuses for why the flowers don't look like the picture.
Honestly, every professional florist knows that pink is only out of season in October. ;)
This post is third in a series. See Why Your Flowers Don't Look Like the Picture - Part 1 and Why Your Flowers Don't Look Like the Picture - Part 2 for more details about avoiding disappointment when ordering flowers online.
Discussions about how Google has been dealing with paid links have raged on for months in the webmaster community. I'm late to the topic but wanted to add my thoughts on the issue and how it effects local flower shops before the year end.
Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, explained how selling posts and links that pass page rank can distort results and can place less-than-helpful entries above pages more relevant to a query. Google instructs webmasters to handle paid links, both in ads and in editorial content, as follows:
Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:
- Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
and urges webmasters to report paid links via the Google Webmaster Tools console.
A couple webmasters involved in the floral industry jumped into the debate and offered differing opinions on the devaluing of paid links. Back in November, Mark McFall of Vital SEO Marketing published about how paid text link schemes were being used by the three largest flower sellers in the US to seemingly manipulate search results. He's right. Those links are and should be worthless. Thanks for the good sleuthing, Mark.
Infinite (RKF), working with both florists and the medical community, weighed in with a comment on Aaron Wall's SEO Book blog about how paid research in the medical field was just as manipulative to Google's users as paid links. While he and others opposed to new devaluations have a point, my own experience with watching how paid links and posts have distorted SERPs about flowers and florists puts me firmly on the 'clean it up' side.
I remember a few years ago filing a spam report about a site that was at or near the top of results for virtually every city in the US for a query "city name+ florist". Interestingly enough, the site wasn't even located in the US and was primarily propelled to the top of all those searches via a text link ad in an English version of an Asian news site - a PR 8.
The next month, another affiliate marketer of flowers, no dummies they, bought an ad, too - with slightly different anchor text. The following month, a third affiliate reseller floral site joined the group and in short order, the three sites - all with directory style navigation full of city-specific pages - were on page 1 for many US communities. My spam report asked why paid links were so trusted as to push those affiliates past the brick & mortar businesses. I don't recall the news site specifically selling page rank, but the effect was the same. Few visitors to that site would be interested in sending so many flowers as to justify the hefty link price.
And of course, it was an affiliate flower seller site that first got outed for using pay-per-post.
Paid links have been one of the top methods for affiliate resellers, order gatherers, to place well for local city queries. Since the affiliates have no relevance geographically, and therefore would be unlikely to receive organic links for specific towns, they've generally need to buy their way in. Effective paid links have long been a heck of a lot cheaper that Adwords for competitive terms that include 'flowers' and 'florists'.
Who's my link hero? Eric Ward. I don't think he won any popularity contests from the chattering class during the link devaluation period with this post:
Selling paid links... If you haven't yet read it, see Danny (Sullivan's) article here. Now, can we all try to agree on one core concept: It's Google's engine, they can do whatever the hell they want with it. Please stop the Google-is-evil talk. They are the best thing that ever happened to those who create really good content, and the worst nightmare to content and link spammers. I've yet to find anyone who works white-hat who thinks Google is evil. For those of us who pursue a very specific type of link building for a very specific type of content, Google rewards us handsomely with higher rankings for our clients. For those that dabble in the dark linking arts, it's your own fault. Face up to it, or stay happy that at least you can still spam Livesearch.
He's the kind of guy that writes about helping non-profits with their link building pro bono simply because their content deserves to be found. Would that the floral industry as a whole have as much passion for good links as Mr. Ward.
Instead, the majority of authority sites and quality directories in our industry don't even openly link to local florists. The few that do either place the links behind password protected areas or use intermediate pages that don't pass pagerank at all. Most say 'they're working on it' but after four years of pleading, I'm not too hopeful. *sigh*
It's no wonder paid links have been so effective in the flower business with the associations and companies in positions to share organic link love continuing to hoard it. And the funny thing is that many of the links that help make them authorities come from those brick and mortar florists.
Here's hoping 2008 is the 'Year of the Link' for local florists. Why not start today by linking to one of your favorite local flower shops?
Take a look at this new animated video from florist services start-up HonestFlorists.com as it humorously addresses what happens to flowers shipped in boxes from fictional ProcessedFlowers.com, 'fresh from the grower'.
It's certainly a clever way to show what happens to boxed, shipped flowers and to get the attention of the florist community.
According to the website, the full array of services from HonestFlorists.com will be unveiled in January. With a start like this, I expect they'll be great interest in both their products and services.
With six shopping days left until Christmas, there's still plenty of time to have a unique holiday flower gift hand crafted and delivered by a local florist.
FlowerChat members shared some of their original floral design offerings last week and another set of photos from a flower shop in Barnegat, NJ, The Rose Garden Florist, was added a few days ago. Actually - two sets.
The first depicts some unique-to-the-store bouquets including this arrangement of Wintry Roses described as a "sweet fragrant treat, for your best holiday wishes!" It features red and bi-color roses, carnations, pines and gilded foliages casually designed in a festive crimson vase.
The second set, featured in a blog post, shows a step-by-step series of photographs of Rose Garden Florist making one of their custom Christmas Tabletop Trees. It's a fun, inside look into the design process of recreating a bit of nature - and then decorating it to reflect a customer's perfect holiday theme.
I think you'll agree that the resulting cherubic Victorian tree would make an outstanding, memorable gift for this Christmas season.
And remember - custom designs like these are available only through your local professional florists.
Across the US and Canada, local florists are creating unique and original floral designs to deck the halls this Christmas season. Below is a sampling of arrangements, centerpieces and flower gifts for the 2007 holidays avaiable from local florists.
A holiday tree centerpiece of boxwood and pine decorated with ribbons, pine cones, berries, carnations and spray chrysanthemums. Delivered in a red tin container, this festive and long-lasting arrangement is a Central Square Florist original.
Available for delivery in the Boston Metro area.
From Twigs Florist of Yerington, NV
Enchanting and elegant red Christmas Roses are delivered arranged with icy branches,Christmas greens, pine cones and a swirl of glittery sheer ribbon.
Available for delivery in Yerington and the Mason Valley.
From Everyday Flowers of Tustin, CA
This Glittering Christmas design arrives in a wooden container with lisianthus, cymbidium orchids, roses. miniature apples, cut limes and lemons, hypericum and pine cones.
You can watch their talented designers create these special flower treats on YouTube.
Available for delivery in Tustin and Orange County, CA.
From Chez Bloom of St. Louis Park and Minneapolis, MN
Glittering frosted birch branches with plum and purple Orchids, Hydrangea and Calla Lilies make this Sugar Plum vase arrangement a dreamy gift.
Available for delivery in Minneapolis and surrounding towns.
From Oberer's Florist of Dayton, Cincinnati and Columbus, OH
A nature inspired Deer Centerpiece that brings woodland enchantment indoors for the Christmas season. This unique and long lasting design features poinsettias, pinecones, twigs, berries, faux apples and fragrant cinnamon sticks.
Available for delivery in Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus and western & central Ohio cities.
From Avante Gardens - florals unique of Anaheim, CA
A long-lasting holiday arrangement of Christmas Orchids featuring imported white dendrobiums, cedar, pine and faux red berries designed in a heavy oval vase and accented with black gem stones.
Available for delivery in Anaheim and most of Orange County, CA
This holiday season, Real Florists remind you to choose your local florist for all your flower needs. You'll not only save $13 - $20 in unnecessary service and handling fees, you'll received fresh and unique hand-delivered gifts with no assembly required.
A lot of holiday entertaining takes place around the dining room table, so one of the most popular floral design types for Christmas is the centerpiece. A centerpiece is defined as:
Something in a central position, especially a decorative object or arrangement placed at the center of a table.
But there's an issue with some of the centerpiece photos on 1800Flowers.com - if local florists who make these orders follow the recipes provided by 1-800-Flowers, the guests seated on one side of your table will see this:
And the friends and family seated on the other side of the table may see something like this:
The next time you see a flower arrangement picture online that looks like this:
...but end up with this:
...you'll know why after watching this video:
Some assembly required indeed.
Kudos to the team at Beneva for capturing the experience of receiving boxed flowers and for adding the tagline: Next time you are looking to send flowers, call your local florist, NO ASSEMBLY REQUIRED.
