Well, the share market has been up and down this week, as has the dollar. We can see fewer people are buying flowers this week and who can blame them? For some of us, its time to batten the hatches and show some restraint on spending.

But don’t worry too much - history shows that, while the florist industry is impacted by downturns in the economy, the news isn’t totally bad. Flowers tend to be one of the few ‘little luxuries’ that people allow themselves.

So, now is definitely the time to make sure the business isn’t wasting any money, but don’t panic and assume you will be shutting shop. You may have to cut some financial corners, but most businesses should be able to continue.

And eventually, as with all cycles, things will get better again.

We were contacted by a Doncaster florist last week who was upset about a customer call she had taken from a Find Me Flowers visitor.

This florist hadn’t told us which wire services she uses, so we were displaying various wire services against her listing. (If a florist doesn’t advertise their wire services, and doesn’t tell us, we can’t know who they use).

She was upset because the potential customer wanted an arrangement displayed in the sidebar for the listing, but the florist was unable to match the price.

We can understand this is a problem, so we have made the following change to the layout on the florist listings on Find Me Flowers - when we don’t know which wire service a florist uses, we won’t display the prices on the sidebar wire service product display.

Obviously reducing the amount of information available to the customer also reduces the likelihood they will buy, but we feel this is a better answer than upset or confused customers.

Where we know which wire services the florist uses we will still display the sidebar pricing for wire services.

We thought it would be good to have somewhere to write about what we are doing with Find Me Flowers.

I don’t expect entries will be very common, as not much happens, but its good to have somewhere to let people know what developments to expect on the directory.

As you probably know, Find Me Flowers is a directory of florists across Australia. We aim to help people find florists local to where they want their flowers delivered.