I wasn’t surprised that the “$20 bouquet” offers online were bogus but I’m hoping others might find this post before they go through the painful upselling process at Proflowers and many other online flower places.
Note that $20 for a bouquet is too cheap – you’d expect to pay more than that at almost any florist shop, but I wish that Proflowers and others would simply state all their extra charges up front so you can buy informed rather than uninformed – having to wait until checkout to see the extra fees. Next time I’ll probably just call a local flower shop directly – that’s what I’ve done in the past but I wanted to see how these online “$20 bouquets” worked. In fact a project I’ll finalized some day helps people find local florists. Google does this pretty well, but FlowerPhones.com will have a database of all florists with easy free access to their information. Contacting florists directly helps cut out the FTD or other middlemen, and in theory gets you a better bouquet for the same price.
In the case of Proflowers the specials offer what look like great bouquets (I’ll report back on that when I have a report on the one I just sent), but then add a delivery charge of about 10 and ‘fees’ of about another $5. Add to that a basic glass vase or “morning delivery” and you can be over $50 quickly. In my particular case I took the upsell that included chocolates and a vase but then discounted my “order” by 15% – though they did not discount delivery so again they are being misleading.
None of these charges are unreasonable, I just don’t like that they obscure them until checkout. The right online approach is to do what vendors like Kayak and Orbitz do – display the FINAL pricing so you can make an informed decision.
In my case I had to spend about a half hour on the Proflowers site and enter my order twice because changing a discount coupons seemed to require me to re-enter. There was probably a way to avoid that by me, but the site does the common and frustrating online trick of presenting you with different pages depending on your entry point – ie the same items can cost different amounts depending on how you enter and navigate the website and use coupons.
I guess there’s nothing really wrong with that, but I prefer more transparency so I know what I’m getting and paying *during the choosing process* rather than at checkout.
… More to come when I hear how and when the flowers arrived …
Joe Duck 
Hello Joe, Thank you for using ProFlowers. We apologize for your disappointment with our ordering process and we appreciate your feedback. Since we delivery through FedEx and UPS, our delivery prices can vary depending on the location and the weight of the package. We do list the range of delivery prices in our Customer Service FAQs section in order to assist customers.
Our flowers are shipped fresh, we guarantee they will last for 7 days. We are here 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to assist you with placing or servicing order. You can also call my team directly at 888-855-3486 between 6AM and 10PM PST if we can assist you.
Best wishes,
Amy
CS Social Media Team
Thanks Amy for the nice response to my concerns. I need to post a follow up here because I did get a picture of the flowers which were happily received by my Aunt but, sadly, were of just modest quality. Proflowers is a nice concept, but perhaps you should review my experiences in a marketing meeting and ask yourselves “are we delivering the best flowers at the best price”, or are we just *pretending* to do that? If I were on your marketing team I’d want to see the return customer stats. I’m just a single person, but I can say that next time I’ll probably be calling a local florist directly so I can have more control over the process both in terms of price and quality. I think I’d wind up paying about the same but probably getting a nicer bouquet. In any case I’m always happy to have guest posts here responding to any of my business concerns so let me know if you want to write one.