Your shop. Your reviews. Your orders.

What shoppers see on your listing page

Your listing is the page a shopper lands on after searching your town, and it is built to answer one question: should I call this shop. The top carries your name, street address, phone and today's hours, because a person sending flowers at 4:40 on a Friday needs to know in two seconds whether you are open and how to reach you. Below that sit your rating and the count of published reviews, then the reviews themselves, with any public reply you have posted under the review it answers. Your categories tell the shopper what you actually do: weddings, sympathy, everyday delivery, plants, a specialty in orchids. Your delivery towns tell them if you deliver to the address they have in mind.

Each element does a job. The address proves you are a real shop, which on this site is the whole premise. The phone is the order button; we do not have another one. The hours prevent the wasted call. The rating and reviews are why the shopper trusts the number enough to dial it rather than falling back to the relay site that outbid you for the top of the search results. A Premium listing adds the photo, which is the first thing the eye lands on, the website link, and the checkmark. Everything on the page is either something you control from the portal or something a customer wrote.

Collecting reviews the honest way

The reviews that help you are the ones written by people who really ordered from you, in their own words, without a nudge from you about what to say. The way to get them is dull and effective: ask, after the flowers have arrived, every time. A line on the delivery card, a short follow-up text or email the next day, a card by the register for walk-ins. Point them to your listing and let them write. Customers who were pleased are surprisingly willing, and the ones who were not will often tell you before they tell the site, which is worth having.

Three things never to do. Do not offer a discount, a free bouquet or a raffle entry for a review; a review bought with anything is a review the guidelines decline, and a pattern of them gets a listing looked at closely. Do not write reviews yourself, or ask staff, family or friendly vendors to write them; a moderator reads every review before it publishes, and the ones that describe an order that never happened are not hard to spot. Do not ask only the customers you know were happy. The rating is a plain average of what is published, and a shop that asks everyone ends up with a truer number and a longer list, both of which shoppers read as the mark of a busy, confident florist.

Answering a negative review

A negative review is going to arrive. A wedding runs late, a substitution is made on a busy holiday, a driver leaves a box on the wrong porch. When one arrives, the review is published if it describes a real experience with your shop, and you get one public reply. Use it carefully, because the reply is not really addressed to the reviewer. It is addressed to the next fifty shoppers who read the exchange and decide from it what kind of business you run.

The reply that works is short and specific. Acknowledge what went wrong in plain words, say what you did or would do about it, and invite the customer to call. Do not argue the facts point by point, do not question the customer's honesty, and do not explain that the holiday was very busy; everyone knows. A calm two-sentence reply under a one-star review does more for a shop than five glowing reviews, because it shows the shopper what happens when things go wrong, and that is the thing they are quietly worried about. If the review breaks a guideline, it is a different matter: report it through the contact page and say which rule, and a person will look. If it is simply unfavorable and true, it stays, and your reply stands beside it.

What the checkmark commits you to

The Verified Local Florist checkmark comes with Premium, and it is the one feature that asks something of you in return. To display it you agree to the RateAFlorist 100% Satisfaction Guarantee: you stand behind your flowers, plants, gifts and delivery service, and when a customer has a problem with an order you make it right. The guarantee is yours, not ours. We never take an order and are not a party to any sale, so we cannot refund anything; what the checkmark tells a shopper is that the shop itself will.

In practice this means what a good florist already does. A wilted arrangement gets replaced. A wrong delivery gets redelivered. A customer who calls upset gets a person on the line who fixes it rather than a form. The mark is withdrawn from a shop that stops honoring that, and we would rather have fewer checkmarks than a checkmark that means nothing. If you would not want to promise that to every customer, stay on the free listing; your rating is calculated and displayed exactly the same way.

How delivery-area listings work

Most shops deliver well beyond their own town line, and the shopper searching for a florist in a small town with no shop of its own still needs one. So a listing can appear in nearby towns the shop truly delivers to. In those towns your shop is shown with its real home base, always: a shop in Bradenton that delivers to Palmetto appears on the Palmetto page as a Bradenton shop, not with a pretend Palmetto address. Nobody is allowed to claim a storefront they do not have, because that is precisely the trick the order-gatherers use, and the whole site exists to be the place where it does not work.

You set your delivery towns yourself in the portal. Keep the list honest. A shop that lists thirty towns and then quotes a punishing fee or declines the order when someone actually calls from the far end of that list is teaching that customer to distrust the site, and the review that follows will say so. The delivery cost guide describes what shoppers have been told to expect, which is a useful thing to know before you set a radius.

The arithmetic of a direct order

Take a $75 order. When it comes through a relay website, the relay keeps a share for itself, often adds its own service fee on top for the customer, and passes the remainder to a shop it picked from a list. The shop fills what it can for the money that reaches it. The customer paid for $75 of flowers, received something smaller, and blames the florist whose name was on the box. Nobody in that chain is happy except the company that never touched a stem. The local florist versus online guide walks shoppers through the same example from their side.

The same $75 order placed by phone, directly with you, is $75 of flowers. You know the customer's name. You can ask what the occasion is and suggest what is fresh. You set the delivery fee. If something goes wrong, the customer calls you, and you fix it, and the review that follows is about a shop that fixed it. Every listing on RateAFlorist points the shopper at your phone and your website, never at a form of ours, because we do not have one. The site's only job is to get the call to you instead of to the middleman.

Mistakes we see on claimed listings

Claiming a listing is free and takes a few minutes at the signup page, and then the listing becomes yours to keep accurate. The mistakes that cost shops customers are small and the same everywhere.

• Stale hours. Holiday hours in particular. A listing that says closed on a Sunday when you are open for Mother's Day sends the caller elsewhere. Update the hours in the portal the week before, and put them back after.
• A wrong or disconnected phone. The phone is the order button. A number that rings to a fax, an old cell, or nothing at all is a listing that produces zero orders no matter how good the rating is.
• No photo on a Premium listing. The photo is a large part of what Premium is paying for. A listing upgraded and left without one is paying for a blank square.
• A category list that says everything. Ticking every category makes a listing look like a template. Tick the ones you actually want the calls for.
• Delivery towns copied from a competitor. List where you really go, for a fee you really charge.
• Reviews left unanswered. A reply is optional, but a long run of negative reviews with no reply reads as a shop that does not care. One calm sentence changes that.

If you run more than one location

Each storefront gets its own listing, because each one has its own address, its own hours and, most of the time, its own reviews. A customer rating the downtown shop is rating the downtown shop. Claim each listing on its own, and decide for each whether Premium is worth it there; a busy flagship and a quiet second location may not want the same thing. Do not merge two shops into one listing to pool the reviews, and do not list a second location at an address that is really a van and a phone. A location on this site is a door a customer can walk through.

The delivery-area rules apply per location, so two shops eight miles apart can both list the town in between, each shown with its own home base. If you close a location, tell us through the contact page and we will retire its listing, because a page pointing at an empty storefront is the one thing the directory is built never to do. The FAQ covers the shorter questions, and the wedding guides are worth reading if events are a large part of the business, since they shape what a shopper expects to hear when they call.