There are a numbers of very poor and deliberately misleading business practices you should be aware of when placing an order on FTD.com.
First, all the pictures of the arrangements you can purchase are deliberately photographed with 90% of the flowers on one side. A (very) few of these arrangements have disclaimers that indicate the designs are one sided. The majority, however, are not one-sided designs and a florist would never build them the way they are pictured on the website. If you look at the recipie associated with the design, you can easily count the flowers in the arrangements pictured to illustrate this point.
Next, you don't get what you pay for. This is how an order works on when placed on FTD.com. Let's say we order an arrangement online for $100. Once you get through checkout you find out there is a $14.99 service fee plus tax.By the way, if your sales tax is say 5.5%, FTD conveniently rounds that up to 6%. Not sure how this can be legal.in anycase, you are now paying 114.99 tax for your $100 arrangement. It gets worse, much worse. Now FTD notifies a florist in the area that you want the arrangement delivered. When this happens, FTD coneniently pockets the $14.99 service fee. This is understandable i suppose, since presumably thats how they pay for such a pretty website and the millions to market it. The problem is, they also keep an addionall 20% commission which they dont tell you about. So the delivering florist gets $80 for the arrangement. Once the florist receives this order, they typically remove an additional $10 dollars (average) for the delivery. FTD officially allows the florist to remove $7.50 from the arrangment for delivery (another thing they dont tell you) but most florist remove their actual delivery charge. So basically, when all is said and done, the arrangement you paid $114.99 for is now being made to the value of $70 or less. The same thing basically happens when having your local florist "wire" or send an arrangement through FTD to another Florist. The difference being that the sending florist keeps the 20% commision (which FTD gets a cut of) and the service fees vary. This is a shamefull practice that has been going on for decades and you should be aware of it. Always the best choice for buying flowers is to use the delivering florists own website or calling them directly. FTD and their memeber florists have a very bad reputation for delivering under valued products that are almost always different than what is ordered. Read their substitution policy when you have a chance; this will show you how much flexability they have with the very specific arrangement you ordered.
0 comments