Create a Free Availability List for Florists

Selling Cut Flowers to Florists

As a flower farmer, it’s important to make the most of the growing season. The entire year of planning builds up to the months where you can enjoy the blooms you’ve been working for. At the same time, making money as a small scale flower farmer is hard. In the era of grocery-store bouquets and an increasing cost-of-living, demonstrating the value of locally grown cut flowers to end-customers can be difficult.

One kind of customer that needs no convincing? Florists!

While every area is different, building relationships and selling blooms to local florists can be a great way to build a stable revenue stream. They have consistent demand and know the unique value of local flowers – from vase-life to unique varieties, and supporting the economy they’re a part of. Your local florists just might end up being your VIP customers.

Availability Lists for Flower Farms

An essential part of selling to florists is the Availability List. An availability list is exactly what it sounds like – a list of flowers and foliage that’s currently available for purchase. Traditionally, flower farmers send their florist customers a list of flowers that are available once a week. This gives florists the opportunity to incorporate the farm’s blooms into their arrangements – local flowers that are fresher, longer-lasting and not otherwise available.

At the same time, this weekly outreach is a way to stay front-of-mind to florists. Here’s an example of what such an email usually looks like:

Other farmers put in serious effort to create a fancy weekly email campaign with paid email marketing software like Mailchimp; while still others simply update a Google Sheets file for florists to browse at their convenience. There are also services like Rooted Farmers that not only charge a hefty subscription fee every month, and also charge 7.9% + 30 cents per transaction for sales made online – wow! Fortunately, there’s an alternative.

While providing personal service and graphic design award-worthy email campaigns is great, most farmers can (and should!) be working on other things while not giving up a large % of their earnings!

Create A Better List with Florlist

You shouldn’t need a huge budget (or team) to start selling to florists.

Florlist is 100% free and lets you create an online, password-protected storefront for florists to browse your available flowers and foliage – complete with detailed information on each variety, your farm logo, a custom background and a professional subdomain (yourfarm.florlist.com) to share with florists.

Florists can easily browse your flowers and foliage that are currently available – and actually create an order request right on your page. No payments are handled through Florlist – which means no fees to worry about! You can arrange your preferred payment method directly with your florist customers, and keep track of payments through your Florlist dashboard.

When a florist places an order, you’ll receive an email notification with the details at a glance.

You can log in to your account to view the order, and modify it if necessary – adjusting quantities and adding any additional fees, taxes or discounts. Plus. you can add an internal note that only you will see.

When everything is set, you can go ahead and generate a professional, branded invoice for your customer with just a click. After confirming, you can change the order status to keep track of payments and delivery.

The Florlist Dashboard

You can manage your page and orders via the Florlist dashboard – which is also branded with your farm logo! The default tab is the Flowers tab – here, it’s incredibly easy to update quantities, edit pricing, change availability status, show/hide flowers from your page and more.

Next, the Orders tab shows all orders, with details at a glance. You can view details, modify orders and generate invoices by clicking the “View” button.

The Analytics tab lets you dive into your page’s performance. You can view the number of visits to your page, sales, orders and stems sold.

Better yet, you can dive into sales by colour, variety, flower and more – informing future planning to better meet local florist demand.

The Subscribers tab features Florlist’s built-in email marketing solution. You can send update emails, customized to your liking, that automatically merge florist names to your message for a personalized touch.

Finally, the Settings tab lets you modify your page settings, and also adjust currency settings, enable automatic inventory control, customize where order notifications go, and more.

Made With Florists In Mind

When we created Florlist, we consulted with florists to learn more about the barriers to purchasing local flowers. One of the most common things we heard is that it’s difficult to plan ahead because of the uncertainty of what flowers are available when – a week’s notice isn’t enough!

With the Availability Calendar feature, florists can browse your farm’s upcoming availability with an easy-to-use calendar view.

Create Your Free Availability List

As you can see – it’s not hard to take your flower farm to the next level with a free, professional online availability list from Florlist. Build a new revenue stream with local florists, keeping them up-to-date and improving access to locally grown blooms

Happy growing!