Operating peculiarities during St.Valentine’s Day and March 8 pre-holiday period – flowers purchase date selection 21-01-2020 / Articles

When our Customers plan to purchase flowers for the holiday deliveries, they would like to have the clearest possible understanding of the market situation, including the possible percentage of the order execution and price policy.

As it has been pointed out on numerous occasions – we can not forecast everything with complete confidence, but based on our longstanding experience we can forecast the possible typical situations on the flower market, for example:

The customer has placed his order in good time, that to receive flowers several days before holiday sales in his city.
As a rule the prices are really heavy before holiday since this is the seasonal peak demand for flowers all over the world’s flower markets. This is the way how the majority of the wholesalers prefer to work in order to manage risks. In this case the Customer is on top of the situation on his order, he has several days to make corrections if necessary.

Some customers decide to purchase flowers just before holidays. In this case, most shipments have already left plantations, some of them are already shipped in Amsterdam and are going to their destinations.
There are two main risk factors:
- in case of departures, loads, customs delays there is chance to receive your holiday delivery late;
- price policy: upon late purchase for the shortly before holiday delivery, the prices are often lower, since the large majority of supplies have been already delivered, and there are still very many flowers on the market.

However, there is a risk “to miss the boat”, when flowers are sold out and the new harvest has not grown yet, and prices remain high. We can just feel sorry about this total fiasco… But it was a conscious decision, maybe next time lucky…

We perform the challenging purchase tasks, but the customer has to choose the days of purchase. The customer makes a decision, we just recommend, we try to offer the most reliable delivery options.

Nearly always we consider the preliminary prices of plantations as overestimated. Whatever the case, the customer will have to make a decision.

Usually we send letters to our customers with the request to confirm or to cancel the purchase of flowers at prices offered by farms.
Some of the customers accept those definitely high prices.

Possible results:
- In case of a scanty flowers harvest (cold sunless weather), the first choice will be the winner: expensive but tasty and surely, from the reliable farm

- If it is a fat year for flowers and there are many flower offers from farms, risk-taking customers, who decided to wait - they get the best price for flowers.

Again, it is important to understand some of the delivery finer points (possible problems with space booking for the best flights, departures delays, problems related to loads, customs) and weigh up all the risks.

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