How To Sell Flowers Online: Ecommerce for Florist Business

9 min read

With online shopping and delivery services becoming more and more popular, we continue to see a shift in the flower industry. Traditional florists are finding it harder to make sales and reach new customers, leading to the false belief that the industry is dying. These rising challenges may have a lot to do with an increased interest in convenient and accessible shopping, and not necessarily with a decreased interest in flower arrangements.

Statistics show that about 18% of internet users worldwide have purchased flowers and gift sets online. The reality is that ecommerce flower shops are not that different from traditional ones. The ecommerce flower industry is simply the addition of modern customer interaction, transaction, and delivery methods, to the traditional commerce model. These additions help significantly lower rental property costs, workload, time, and energy for sellers and customers making it possible to get more from each sale.

As for the way this incredibly convenient way of selling and shopping is possible, it has a lot to do with the help of ecommerce platforms like Ecwid. This makes it easy to take care of all of the web design, transaction, and order-management processes, making it easier than ever to start an online flower shop.

The online flower industry might sound like a mystery or a threat for many, but we are here to destroy all of these claims. Continue reading and find out how you can easily make the switch to selling flowers online, or simply add this option without the need to get rid of your physical store.

Reasons why to start a local florist delivery business:

Unsaturated market. Big opportunity for local florists to stand out from the rest.
Lower business cost. No need to pay for rental space.
Ease of customization. Customers have more room for creativity.
Makes shopping easier. No need to move from your home.
Big opportunity to reach new customers. Bigger chance of being found by many.

These are just some of the many reasons to start an online delivery flower shop that we’ll have time to cover in this quick post.

Online Flower Shops Offer an Opportunity to Stand Out from the Rest

Offering local flower delivery services is a great way to create a solution to a common need. Oftentimes, due to work or simply distance, many find it hard to send their loved one’s flowers whenever there is a special occasion or simply as a way to show them some. Having the option of someone else delivering their loved one’s gift right to their doorsteps is something many are willing to pay for.

It’s not possible for a customer who is in Texas, for example, to know what kind of flowers are offered by a local florist in Florida, where their loved one resides, without having access to a website containing pictures, descriptions, and videos. This is why online presence becomes necessary, even if you are a local and physical florist.

Just imagine someone who knows nothing about flowers calling to place an order without knowing what each flower you name looks like?

This quickly becomes an impossible mission, one which highlights the importance of access to a web store, as it creates more room for customization and offers a nice preview to your customers. This sets you ahead of other stores that cannot offer the same.

Besides it being a necessity, having a website and transitioning your flower shop to an online delivery one is currently considered a smart business move. This is mainly because the online flower industry is not as saturated yet, with few florists that offer these kinds of experiences and services. This makes it a great time to start an online flower shop.

Ecommerce Can Lower Florists Business Costs

Many flower shop owners are aware that facility rent and maintenance are some of the biggest expenses of being a florist. What many don’t know is that it is relatively easy to run a flower shop completely online. Yes, with ecommerce there is no need for rental space or facility maintenance fees; all you probably need is storage space if you lack some at home.

With ecommerce, customers no longer need a physical location to take a look at the flowers you sell, nor need to visit a store to make a payment. This is all taken care of through your ecommerce site. To learn more about Ecwid’s free site creation plan and how to start an ecommerce shop check out How to Create an Ecommerce Store with Ecwid.

Ecommerce Makes Shopping Easy

As briefly covered above, offering online delivery flower services eliminates the need for customers to travel to your store. These days it is simply much preferable to have items delivered to one’s door, especially when there is a distance of more than 30 minutes involved. This preference for convenience creates a unique opportunity for flower shop owners to reach more customers and charge higher delivery prices as they are no longer limited to one city or location.

Can be done anytime and anywhere

Offering the availability to make online purchases and orders not only eliminates business location restrictions, but also allows you to make sales from customers who are in other states of the country. Coming back to the example above, if someone in Texas wanted to give a loved one in Florida a nice flower arrangement for a special occasion, it would be impossible without the opportunity to place an online order in a store near their loved one and have them deliver the item to them.

Big opportunity to reach new customers

Taking your flower business online means you’ll have the opportunity to create a website that is optimized and capable of extending your reach to anyone in the nation or the world if you wanted to go that far.

Once you create a free website with our Ecwid free plan, you can choose to optimize your site with the help of SEO. Check out our Introduction to SEO blog post if you are new to the term.

Seo can help you build your authority over other local or statewide shops, drive more people to your site, and increase your conversions, which ultimately means more sales. When your site is optimized for desktop and mobile, this means it has the opportunity to rank at the top of someone’s online search, making it more likely for them to choose you. This also means that anyone looking to buy flowers in your area will immediately come across your store.

Final Thoughts

The ecommerce flower industry may sound like a lot of work and technical knowledge, but the reality is that it is easier to open an online flower shop than it is to open a physical one. With a platform like Ecwid, you can have a store ready in a matter of an hour or less, where everything from checkout, design, product listing, to secure payments is taken care of. We’d love to help you get started. We encourage you to drop a comment below with your questions. We are here to help!

Sell online

With Ecwid Ecommerce, you can easily sell anywhere, to anyone — across the internet and around the world.

Get started

Apr 26, 2021

About the author

Max has been working in the ecommerce industry for the last six years helping brands to establish and level-up content marketing and SEO. Despite that, he has experience with entrepreneurship. He is a fiction writer in his free time.