With the Mother’s Day holiday approaching, Flower Shop Network would like to make these suggestions to ensure your satisfaction as well as your customer’s, on orders placed going outside your delivery area:

Encourage customers to place orders early.

Consider minimum order amounts of at least $40 PLUS a delivery charge. Shops in METRO areas may require $50 PLUS a delivery charge.

Allow an additional $ 5.00- $10.00 for delivery. Metro and rural delivery areas may run $10 to $15.

Obtain a 2nd choice/ or color for product.

Obtain recipient phone numbers. Many shops will not attempt delivery without a recipient phone number.

Send your orders via www.fsnf2f.com the fastest, lowest cost and most accurate way to send your orders. If you are not setup call 800-858-9925 today for immediate access.

Our Florist to Florist relay department will be on an extended schedule Mother’s Day week to better serve you. Our Mother’s Day Holiday Hours are:

7:00am to 7:00pm CST - Monday, May 1st - Friday, May 5th
7:00am to 5:00pm CST - Saturday May 6th
Relay Office Closed on Sunday May 7th
7:00am to 8:00pm CST - Monday May 8th - Friday May 12th
7:00am to 6:00pm CST - Saturday May 13th
10:00AM to 2:00pm CST - Sunday May 14th

Julie Ratliff
Relay Department Manager

As part of an effort by a small group of florist to help educate consumers about the quality, value, service and design that professional florists bring to the gift of flowers, Avante Gardens participated in a an unusual guarantee program whereby we offered to replace flowers delivered by drop-ship companies during the Valentine's Day holiday.

The above news snippet was from blog post on Avante Garden's Flower Shop company blog. It describes an interesting approach to combat the growing challenges that real, local florists are facing when trying to compete with direct ship flower companies and floral order gatherers.

Read the full blog post from Avante Gardens about Replacing Someone Else's Flowers.

Read the Press Release on PRWeb.com.

Flower Shop Network is proud to announce the formal launch of our Holiday Email Campaigns program. The holiday email program has actually been in beta since October of 2005. The program experienced tremendous success during beta testing and thoroughly increased traffic to FSN member sites. As a result of that early success, Flower Shop Network is has campaigns scheduled throughout the remainder of 2006.

This is how it works: Before each major floral holiday, Flower Shop Network sends holiday-themed email messages to subscribers, showcasing current featured holiday arrangements.

This helps the local florist by reminding consumers:

that flowers are great last-minute gift ideas for any occasion.

how easy it is to send flowers to someone almost anywhere.

to order their flowers direct from a real, local florist or flower shop.

Flower Shop Network never competes against you by taking orders from your customers. All consumer orders phoned directly to your shop, as well as consumer web orders placed on your FSN Website and sent to you via FSN Relay, represent more flower orders coming into your shop at 100%.

Direct consumer orders are more profitable for your business, and you also receive valuable consumer information that allows you to market to your customers for profitable, repeat business.

FSN Member Florists can also utilize FSN Holiday Email Announcements as a marketing piece that is easy to forward to their own customer address book or database right before the holiday. Please review our terms of use before modifying the email announcements and contact us if you have any questions about forwarding these messages on to your customers.

Click here to view samples of the FSN Holiday Email Announcements, another way that FSN is bringing more and more profitable consumer orders directly to your shop.

The holiday email campaigns are just another valuable service provided to the member florists of Flower Shop Network.

Keep an eye on this news section and the Florists Only section of our site for the latest information about new features and programs provided by Flower Shop Network.