Flowers insolita Blog

In the previous post, I wrote how yellowpages.com lists numerous bogus florists in their local listing.  What about their main competitor, superpages.com by Verizon?

If you look for ‘florists’ in ‘Huntington NY’ in superpages.com, you will be presented with “only” 73 florists, which is a vast improvement compared to >1,400 “florists” listed in yellowpages.com.

But again, our town doesn’t have 73 florists.  Not even close.

Most of these 73 florists are national floral-order brokers, such as FTD, JustFlowers, etc.

Let’s sort by ‘distance’ again, which is supposed to list only the local florists.  Take a look (Click).

At the top, you will see a business called “Huntington Florists NY – All American Flowers.”

This is a bogus florist that doesn’t exist in Huntington.  In fact they are located in 4201 Church St, suite 2, Mt Laurel, NJ.  They aren’t even a florist.

This bogus “florist” in NJ does this all over the US and Canada.  They are a well-known crook in our industry.

Verizon knows about them and does nothing.  No surprise here.

Do you think Yellowpages are reliable sources of local businesses?  Well, think again.

If you look for ‘Florists’ in ‘Huntington NY’ in yellowpages.com (AT&T), you will be presented with a list of 1,435 florists. We can safely tell you that our town doesn’t have 1,435 florists.  Who are they?  They are various businesses in Long Island and elsewhere who claim to serve Huntington NY.  OK, fair enough.

So let’s click on ‘distance’ tab, which is supposed to list only the florists physically located in Huntington.  Take a look (click).

You will see our listing and a few of our local competitors, fine.

But who are ’1StopFlorists’ ‘Floral Ftd Directory Information’ ‘Floral Teleflora Directory Information’ ‘Huntington Florist Concierge’ and so on?

They are bogus florists who don’t even exist in our town.

How did they manage to be listed in Huntington?  They purchased either 800/888 numbers or even local number (631) with bogus local addresses (let’s say 1234 main street). These companies do this, not only in Huntington, but everywhere in the US and Canada.

Many florists complain to yellowpages.com.  They ignored us.  As long as they earn ad revenues from these bogus florists who hurt local businesses, AT&T doesn’t care.

So, I would not trust Yellowpages.com.  If they allow this sort of practice for florists, I believe that there are many other similar bogus listings for other types of businesses.

“Local” listing?  What a joke.