When can a company get away with routinely charging 50 percent more than the advertised price for its items? Repeatedly? On Valentine’s Day, of course, when good-hearted souls go online to buy flowers for the people they love and instead get taken to the cleaners. It’s the most clear example of the Gotcha economy I know.
Some of the fault lies in misplaced trust of sports talk radio, where wall-to-wall flower ads crowd the airwaves in the days before Feb. 14, most of them horribly misleading. But the real responsibility lies, of course, with the merchants, who have fully embraced a strategy that claims flowers cost $40 on their homepage and in ads, but can’t possibility be purchased for less than $60 or $70 some five or six clicks later. The queen of the parade of rose deception is ProFlowers.com, which takes great pains to trick users into ordering flowers before they realize the price has bloomed over 50 percent. As you’ll see from the screen shots below, it’s amazing to me this firms gets away with the clear deception by design year after year.
But first, let’s get this out of the way. Today is Monday, men. Valentine’s Day is Friday. That means today is the very last day you can order flowers without paying a huge procrastinator’s premium. While all these sites I’m about to discuss frustrate me for their misleading ways, as long as you know the game you are playing, you can emerge unscathed. As always, my primary recommendation is to go to a local florist and buy a bouquet that you pick — it’s a more meaningful gift, and you’ll know what you are getting. Don’t be afraid to buy the flowers a couple of days early, and even give them early. No one ever complains about getting flowers early! Walk into a florist on Thursday evening and you probably deserve the price you’ll pay.
But buying online is a real and convenient options. We’re going to look at ProFlowers.com, 1800Flowers.com, and FTD.com. I offer no opinions about the quality of the flowers you will get. I’m here to discuss how the gotcha economy makes things unnecessarily complicated, and gums up the real functions of a free market. (Want to learn more? Read my book Gotcha Capitalism.)
At all three sites, you can’t find out what you’ll pay until you spend 10-15 clicking through a series of menus, entering addresses and phone numbers, etc. And in each case, for a basic rose bouquet, the out-the-door price is around 50 percent higher than the price you see when you first pick a bouquet. For example. FTD.com offers what seems to be a lovely, simple box of one dozen roses for $40. But on the last ordering screen, you will be sad to learn that the service charge for delivery Feb. 13 is $20, for a total of $60.
All three sites do this because they know you are probably lazy, and once you invest all that time into filling in the forms, and composing a sweet note for the gift card, you probably won’t abandon the purchase. If you are an intelligent consumer — i.e.,if you are fulfilling your patriotic duty to act as a rational consumer in our alleged free market — you will complete this laborious process for all these sites, and then make your most informed decision based on cost and perceived quality. But only nerds like me do that.
I know, service charges vary based on delivery location and date chosen, making it impossible for these sites to give a final price until they have some information from you. It would be easy, however, for these stories to estimate the true cost on their home pages and adjust it a few dollars in each direction based on individual selections. In fact, I’m surprised some federal agency (FTC, I’m looking at you) doesn’t require this as part of “clear and conspicuous” pricing.
Confusing consumers’ price sensitivity by adding fees and services charges at the last moment is the very definition of what I call Gotcha Capitalism. And that’s bad enough. But, to their credit, I do believe FTD and 1800Flowers do a fair job of at least informing consumers what they will really pay before they are tempted to click “place order.” At FTD.com, for example, users may not learn about that $40 fee until the last moment, but at least it is directly adjacent to the order button, and is displayed in prominent text (See image). 1800Flowers does something similar. While I wish the total price was more obvious earlier, I do not think these sites are deceptive. In fact, I wonder if they could afford to be more upfront if it weren’t for ProFlowers.com.
At ProFlowers, consumers march through the 7-8 clicks and fill out the forms needed to order flowers, blissfully unaware of the true costs of their purchase. It’s amazing what happens on the final ordering page, however. There’s suddenly a long list of itemized fees: standard delivery fee, Feb. 13 delivery, free vase fee, care & handling, free vase fee rebate. That’s bad enough. But the real problem is where that charge is displayed– at the bottom of the page. Depending on your screen resolution, I’d call it “below the fold” in old newspaper terminology. But even worse, it could hardly be farther from the “confirm order now” button atop the page. That button is also adorned in special colors. There’s a large arrow pointing at it. It almost looks like a neon flashing “motel” sign. All this is clearly designed so an exhausted consumer simply clicks without scrolling, and has no idea about the standard delivery; Feb. 13 delivery, free vase fee, care & handling, free vase fee rebate.
One last major complaint: at ProFlowers, you cannot see the price until you send the site your credit card information. At the other two sites, you can at least see the price on the same page as you enter the data. ProFlowers wins my Gotcha-est florist award for this year.
The saddest part of this mucked-up purchasing process is: ProFlowers, with the appropriate discounts applied, often has the cheapest prices. If it competed cleanly on price, it would probably win. Instead, their flowers smell bad by the time you realize what you’ve paid.
Do your part to end the purveyors of Gotchas! Never order flowers online — or anything else — without scanning that final order page for lists of surprise fees. And as for buying flowers for Valentine’s Day, do it! But:
- Make your plan now! Order online today, or better yet go to a store today
- Take delivery early: At most sites, you’ll save a couple of bucks by acceptive delivery on Feb. 13
- Complain! If you don’t like being treated this way, send an email to the online retailer
- Those free shipping/rebate offers have a very bad reputation. Just don’t click.
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