Not A Great Week To Be Selling Flowers!
Hot on the heels of Jackie’s post last week about a customer suing his regular florist for the princely sum of £750k (for revealing his infidelities), today we read this headline: “Interflora website ‘rips off’ customers“. For an industry that brings happiness and joy, love and best wishes, it’s certainly been a grim seven days for certain players in the world of flower delivery. On the other hand, if true, it sounds like Interflora may have been pretty idiotic in their (alleged!) behaviour and the way they’ve (allegedly!) treated their customers so we shouldn’t have too much sympathy for them. The customer is king and should be treated like royalty. Businesses only have themselves to blame if they forget that.
We’re currently rebuilding our checkout, to allow returning customers to pass through the site more quickly and efficiently. How? Well, the key thing is not having to re-enter the same information each time you visit. Eg all your previous addresses and delivery instructions will soon be available with a single click in check out. I’ve seen it working on our development server and it’s very cool. More importantly, it’s intuitive, easy and quick.
Another idea relates to taking regular payments from customers. This is potentially a gigantic can of worms (as Interflora has found out) and something we are approaching with extreme caution. We’re taking lots of advice from the payments experts at PayPal on this front so we work out exactly how to do things before we even think about building something. A customer’s trust is hugely valuable – it’s hard to win, very easy to lose and almost impossible to win back. Trust is one area that we hope we never, ever mess up and we go to great lengths to avoid even the possibility of any problems.
We’ve got some other cool ideas but if we told you what they were, we’d have to kill you! While Interflora might be busy beating off the unwelcome attentions of the Financial Services Authority and the Office of Fair Trade, we still don’t want to give them, or anyone else, a head start on our new ideas. You’ll just have to come back to the site over the next few weeks, try the checkout and see if it’s changed. If it hasn’t, well just buy your partner that dozen red roses bouquet anyway! :)
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Filed under: Big Mistakes, Customers, Ethics & Environment, Fraud, Matters Webby on August 21st, 2007
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I’m with you guys. At a time of the year when fresh flowers are gorgeous, abundant and at some of their best prices of the year, the last thing consumers need is a fear of florists – especially based on lack of trust.
As you may already know, Interflora is owned by US-based FTD, as is Webloyalty, the owner of Shopper Discounts & Rewards.
A class action lawsuit alleging Webloyalty “has reaped and continues to reap tens of millions of dollars off consumers by illegally obtaining the personal, private information, including credit card information, of visitors to its partners’ websites” is currently in litigation in Massachusetts. http://www.lerachlaw.com/lcsr-cgi-bin/mil?templ=cases/webloyalty/pr.html
It will be interesting to see how the UK handles this scheme.
BTW, you guys have an impressive site. :)
Wow. Didn’t quite realise the scale of the intrigue. Rather them than us!
PS thanks for kind words about the site. Much appreciated.
:)
Wow. That is what is bringing down this great country of mine. Lawsuits galore! Justifiably, a business must always look after the consumers privacy. They were trying to do a little more marketing and in the end, it was the wrong thing. America has to realize this is why we outsource all our work to other areas since frivilous lawsuits run rampant.
Hi ! Congratulations to your website, like it very much. I have put some lines on my news flower blog, and put 2 of your great bottons on my site as well.
If the bottons are not okay, just drop me a line, and i will remove them.
Regards
Leo
i have a new proposal or great idea on artificial silk flower, i believe by producting this it will go along way.
thanks