engfer(s)

Give Them Something Special

• Maybe it’s time to stop sending gift cards and ugly sweaters to people on those special occasions and holidays.
• Maybe it’s time that you sent something to your significant other on a whim to remind them that you care for them.
• Maybe you know someone in the hospital or is depressed that could use a thoughtful pick-me-up.

Whatever your reason may be, it’s time that you did something about it. Here’s a list to keep those relationship(s) strong and intact.

Give Me the List

5. From You Flowers

Ignoring the fact that they have cheesy names for their bouquets, they do a good job with the presentation of their arrangements. FromYouFlowers has international delivery with pretty amazing coverage as well.

They do have same day delivery, but it’s on a limited set of arrangements, and if you need help with your orders or their site, they have live chat support (powered by InstantService) to answer your questions.

Their prices start at $29.99 and head up as high as you want, but it’s backed by a 100% satisfaction guarantee policy, which is always nice.

Plus, there is a nice benefit for Google Checkout customers; they save $5 on every order.

4. Teleflora

Besides having a sensual pseudo-latino name, Teleflora has one of the most clean interfaces we have seen for a floral arrangement delivery site (it’s simple and professional).

They also provide a sort of yellow-page search for finding florists in your area called FindAFlorist.com

Teleflora has partnerships with other companies, which offer better discounts. If you are a USAA memeber, you can get 15% off floral arrangements by following the link from inside your USAA account.

Their selection is good and the website is clean, however, these items alone will not get a contender slot for the 1st place title, so Teleflora remains here in 4th position.

3. Cookies By Design

Technically, these aren’t real flowers; however, sometimes it’s good to send a little bit more than just flowers. Rather than sending a typical bouquet of roses to your special someone, give them a special treat they can eat! (we should work for their marketing department).

Actually, we use this service because they have bouquets of cookies for every type of occasion: get well, congrats, housewarming, weddings, thank you, birthdays, holidays, cartoon, etc.; moreover, their cookies are handmade and they actually taste good…

*The biggest problem is you will be paying a higher price for these handmade creative cookie concoctions; however, if you examine the similarities between their prices and the price of an equivalent bouquet of normal flowers, it’s pretty comparable.

You can view their Full Pricing Guide for more details, but here is the gist:

• Cookie bouquets range from $25.45 – $111.95
• Gourmet cookies range from $1.55 – $48.35
• Delivery charges range from $1.00 – $25.00

2. 1-800-flowers (flowers.com)

You’d hope that by owning the domain flowers.com, the site would live up to the standards of such a pivotal and coveted namespace; luckily for all of us, 1-800-fowers does live up to that standard.

1-800-flowers is the pinnacle of corporate flower-dom. With stock symbol FLWS, you would think this company would be at spot numero uno on our list. However, it’s not, but it did runner-up!

Ordering flowers are simple and easy from their websites and phone service, and they have international delivery and same-day delivery as well; however, their same day selection is limited.

If flowers aren’t your gift of choice, you can chose from their family of other brands which sell wine, cheese, sweets, children’s furniture, home and garden items & popcorn.

On another note, if you are still too lazy to pick out a bouquet of flowers, you can give someone a gift card for 1-800-flowers instead…

Interestingly enough, 1-800-flowers offers a non-credit customer account card that you can pay with which has a points system you can use to buy more flowers and gifts.

ProFlowers.com

Ahh, the coveted and honorable first place slot in our subjective and objective list of flower delivery websites goes to Proflowers.com, and here’s why:

1. We found that it was easy and quick to find what we wanted because their menus are contained in logical categories to shop in:
   • Occasion, flower-type, plant-type, color, price, & discounted items
2. Not only do they have floral arrangements, but they also decided to sell gourmet gifts:
   1. Cakes, cookies & brownies
   2. Hand-dipped strawberries
   3. Spa gift baskets
   4. Fruits, nuts, truffles & chocolates.
3. They have such a good seasonal selection that can satisfy every taste and occasion
4. They have a very nice selection of same-day delivery bouquets (provided by their Florist Express service)
5. They have InstantService live chat support so you don’t need to pick up the phone

The reason they can offer other products is because of the other companies under the ProFlower brand; this includes Secret Spoon Sweets (gourmet chocolate, truffles, and sweets) and Cherry Moon Farms (fruit, nut & spa gift baskets). They also have a sister company, Flowerfarm, that offers international deliveries as well.

It is because of their customer service and simple fast production selection that ProFlowers.com is the best (IMHO) online flower delivery site.

This is All Wrong

If you think that this list sucks or we left out some other site, please feel free to tell us about it!!

Either way, it’s time you gave something special to someone, so go fork up the $$ and give!