[brudgers]

Looking at what you are currently doing, the next step is to talk to your local florist.

Will they allow you to set up a subscription with them?

If so, under what terms [e.g. suppose you pay up front]?

Everything else is just a feature. Most of them burden the florist and increase their overhead and risk. Florists are who you need to get to buy in. They're small businesses. They don't consume API's.

Good luck.

[harrisonhjones]

That true. I think the value such an API / service would provide to florists is that the service / API would:

1. Handle online ordering so they wouldn't have to 2. Drive customers to them

And do so in a way where they could still have a "personal relationship" with the flower purchasers.

The single downside, that I can see, is the whole "reviews" issue (I have no desire to become like Yelp and be known for "shaking down" businesses). I'll have to think about that.

I'll take your advise and talk to a couple florists. I don't think they, the florists, would need to handle the subscriptions. As long as they allowed repeat orders and they handled them independently they wouldn't even need to know it was a subscription. The main thing to discuss would be some kind of discount if the service could guarantee some level of purchasing from the subscriptions.

[brudgers]

When a potential client comes to me and says give me a discount and I will give you a lot of work, they remain a potential client...only at a much lower voltage.

Anyway, my advice would to learn about the floral industry before thinking about a business model. My intuition is that florists make most of their money most of the time from B2B relationships with businesses such as funeral homes, churches, event planners, etc and that their B2C revenue is mostly centered around Valentines, Mothers Day, and Prom at the local high school.

To put it another way, florists who still exist exist because they have already have a working business model. Any service you provide has to exceed the florist's opportunity cost before it is worth charging even full retail price.