Valentines Flowers – Brand versus Non Brand

OK, unless you're walking around with your eyes shut you can't fail to notice that Valentines Day is nearly upon us. BTW is it me or is Valentines Day *much bigger* this year? It seems that every store in the high street has some sort of Valentines promotion on the go, no matter how tedious the link, same applies online. Anyway, I digress...

Obviously one of the bestsellers at this time of the year is flowers. According to recent research £151 million pounds is spent on flowers at this time of the year. Worth having a slice of that pie then! So I have duly had a few Valentines campaigns running for a few weeks now, mainly focusing on flowers.

Now, here is what annoys me. Below are the commission levels available from some of the big online flower brands.

Tesco Flowers - 2%
Marks and Spencer Flowers - 3%
John Lewis Flowers - 2%
Debenhams Flowers - 2% (welcome back to AM Debenhams, however, must try harder)

Hardly inspiring is it? The average spend on flowers for Valentines day is £24. So you make a £24 sale and you get rewarded with 48p worth of commission at 2% - big woop.

So why is it that these flower programs offers such a low commission rate? Well the biggest reason which I keep hearing from these merchants is "brand". Yes the almighty BRAND. Tesco, M&S etc. spend millions of pounds each year gaining brand recognition which in turn gains customer confidence and therefore trust and at the end of the day improves conversions.

Now while I don't disagree with this, I don't buy into it 100% either.

Let's take some other lesser-known flower merchants for example and review their commission rates:

Bunches - 10% to 12%
Post a Rose - 8% to 10%
Flowers Direct - 15% to 20%
Eden4Flowers - 10%
Roses by Design - 10% to 15%

Quite a difference isn't there? But if you believe the high street merchants brand blurb you will still earn more money with them as they are a "household name" and convert better. OK then lets see shall we?

For the first 5 days of February I've been promoting Tesco and Bunches (amongst others) on one of my sites. Below are the actual results of the sales made by both merchants during that 5 day period.

Tesco Flowers - 31 sales, £21.04 commission. 11% conversion rate
Bunches - 35 sales, £98.54 commission. 16% conversion rate

Kind of puts paid to the "brand" argument doesn't it?

So not only have I made more sales with the "no-brand" Bunches, but I've also made 4 times the commission and it converts a lot better too. All of this *despite* the fact that Bunches has a freephone number for orders on its homepage and Tesco doesn't!

So what have we learned? Well the way I look at it is that a lot of users surf the web to compare prices and find the lowest price for whatever product/service they are searching for. For whatever reason, people believe that it is still cheaper to buy anything online than it is in the high street. So when they search they always have "price" in the forefront of their mind. At the cost of "brand". It seems that customers will buy from wherever they can find the best deal, brand loyalty doesn't play much of a part.

So the next time a merchant tells you that their commission rates are 500% under the market average because of their "brand awareness and high conversion rates" you know what to tell them don't you?

What I'm listening to right now: Bow Wow and Ciara - "Like You"