What actually happens to your order on the apps

We fulfil the occasional relay order ourselves, so we can say this fairly: the platform model has a built-in haircut — here's where your money goes and how a direct order differs.

Follow the money on a $90 app order

A typical relay platform takes 20–30% off the top, plus service fees you pay and handling the local shop absorbs. Your $90 bouquet arrives to the fulfilling florist as roughly $60 of product budget.

The florist isn't cheating you — they're building $60 of flowers for a photo that showed $90. Same stem-count logic, squeezed margins. Direct orders land at full value on the bench, which is why our prices for the same size run lower than the app equivalent.

Order tablet and fresh stems side by side on the studio bench

the order arrives smaller than the photo promised

What the photo hides

Catalogue photos show an ideal arrangement built once by the platform's best studio. What gets fulfilled locally varies by whoever's on the roster that day:

Direct vs. platform, honestly

Direct: you talk to the person making it — changes and notes actually arrive.
Direct: photo approval before dispatch (our standard).
Platform: the photo is illustrative, substitutions are silent.
Direct: delivery timing is ours to own, not a courier lottery.
Platform: complaints route through a ticket system, not a florist.

We take relay orders sometimes — they're jobs. But I always think: this customer paid $90 and doesn't know $30 of it bought them a middleman.

Tom Reedy, florist

Our driver loading boxed bouquets into the van for a local run

Where the apps do win

Fairness: for a delivery to a town you've never heard of, a relay network is genuinely useful — they know a florist there; you don't. Ordering flowers for someone interstate through a platform is reasonable.

Inside our own delivery zone it's different maths. Same-day cutoffs, photo approval, and a phone number that a person answers beat a service ticket every time. And the bouquet photographs like the website promised because we sent you the photo ourselves.

Take-home