Flowers insolita Blog

Let’s say you want to order Sunflowers. You type in “Flower delivery” in Google and find flowerdelivery.com, which is one of many, many web sites run by JustFlowers.

You look for Sunflowers and here’s what you might like. A bit pricey, but the arrangement looks good for the money, if that’s what you will get (which you won’t as we will show below).

Now they say that’s $59.99. But if you click on a tiny link (pricing info), you will discover this disclaimer.

That’s right. The $59.99 “may” include what they call “handling fee.” In plain English, you won’t get $59.99 worth of flowers. Hmmm… whatever. Most people don’t really understand what this means anyway. They don’t want you to understand. So you just go on to checkout.

OK, let’s look at the final checkout screen. Look very very closely, before clicking on “Place Your Order.”

First, they added what they call “shipping and service fee” of $9.99. The total is now almost $70, not $59.99. Most Internet “florist” sites will charge this rip-off fee (we don’t).

Second, they devalued $7.20 from the value of flowers as “handling fee”, so the value of your Sunflower is now $52.79.

You know, Internet “florists” don’t make/deliver your flowers. They are telemarketers; they just send out this order to a real florist who fills the order for them. The amount they will transfer is $52.79, not $70 you paid. They just pocketed $9.99 “Service fee” and $7.20 “Handling fee” from your money. That’s their business, folks.

The florist who actually makes this arrangement is allowed to further subtract their delivery charge, a fact that JustFlowers chose not to disclose. The average delivery charge is about $7. This is not a rip off. The filling florists are allowed to deduct our delivery charge from the money we receive from another florist or a middleman.

Thus, after all those fees and charges, the money left for Sunflowers will be only about $45. That’s right. Imagine that, you pay $70 and get $45 flowers!

With only $45 left, our professional opinion is that it is highly unlikely that recipient of your Sunflowers will get the gorgeous 12+ Sunflowers shown in the picture. Instead, s/he will get probably only 6-8 stems depending on the season and locality. The scariest part is that, you most likely won’t find out about the smaller Sunflower arrangement, because you are sending it to someone else and you won’t see it yourself. Most recipients of gifts will say “How nice” to you as a matter of courtesy.

We at Flowers insolita believe this is a terrible, terrible deception that’s hurting our industry.

If you call a local, real florist, you will not be cheated like this. Please don’t go through a middle man. Go to Yahoo-local or Google-local instead, and look for local florists. Alternatively, you can just call us. We can take your order and send it to anywhere in the world, at no service charge.