FTD: February 2007 Archives

Florists and consumers alike continue to react with anger and disappointment brought on by FTD's failure to deliver both flowers and orders during Valentine's Day week.

Left in the wake of the FTD Mercury Direct failure are thousands of customer orders that never reached florists for fulfillment - or Valentines to express love - during the busy holiday period.

On the florists' front, some long-time FTD member flower shop owners have reported taking down their logo signage and scraping decals from windows and delivery vans. As Mike of Holden's Florist, Dundas ON said in his comments to the previous article:

It’s so sad, that such a high profile “dis-organization” could lack such respect for it’s OWN customers in a way, as to deny that THEY were entirely responsible for the V-Day meltdown, and quickly take charge, control, and admit to it’s antiquated equipment failure!!

Order transmittal is ESSENTIAL to many florists, and is an integral part of the florist business…it’s too bad that FTD’s lack of integrity, has lost them the internal trust they ONCE had from florist members, and their customers!!

On the consumer front, FTD continues to take a beating in shopper rating sites such as BizRate, The Consumerist, Yahoo, Epinions and PlanetFeedback.

One flower buyer has been so angered at FTD's lack of delivery and poor customer service that he created DontUseFTD.com in protest. Eight days after placing his order, he finally got through to FTD's customer service.

“Yes, we’ve been working 14 hour days trying to catch up.”, she said. “There was a weather related emergency and DHL could not deliver thousands of orders.”

DHL? There are several, if not dozens, of florists within blocks of the address I wanted flowers delivered too. Why on earth would you SHIP them?

I returned, “I doubt they would have been shipped. I do have my order number if that would help.” and she took my order number and began typing away. “Oh”, she said, “this order was handled by a florist, let’s see what happened. Oh, I see, the order was rejected. We have been trying to contact those people for days, we must have missed you.”

One florist rejecting an order would have been no big deal if FTD's technology hadn't failed - but with the Mercury Direct break down, many rejected orders disappeared into a dark hole and didn't reappear until well after they could be re-routed for prompt delivery.

(Does anyone else think the CSR's explanation made it sound as if the non-delivery was a local florist's fault?)

FTD's Valentine's Day 2007 menu was promoting far more lower-priced, high margin, DHL delivered boxes of flowers (even though they looked like arrangements on FTD.com) than florist-delivered, professionally designed flowers. So while local florists were heroically getting flowers to Valentines through near-blizzard conditions in many parts of the country, FTD's DHL delivered boxes, primarily shipped from Miami, had much further to travel - and missed many Sweethearts on their big day.

FTD could have contacted their customers about the weather delays - or placed a notice on their website, or sent out an email broadcast - just as thousands of local florists did - but instead, FTD chose to leave calls and emails unanswered and Valentines in the dark - for days.

This holiday debacle won't soon be forgotten.

Mercury Network experiences major outages during critical holiday period.

Word of an FTD Tech melt-down started brewing on florist message boards on Friday, February 9, when independently owned and operated flower shop owners started reporting orders sent through FTD's proprietary Mercury Network were not getting through to their stores. Some of the florists said FTD's Tech department was initially blaming the interfaces of Point Of Sale systems sold by third party vendors.

"After umteen phone calls finally a tech told me that all high-speed intranet members a gadget that is connected to host is down and that is what they are working on."

"We started the holiday on DSL and serious problems for two days, with FTD telling us it was our fault. We were fortunate enough to still have the old equipment sitting there so we went back to the good ol modem--which worked fine the rest of the holiday. We invested a good amount of time, effort and money in moving our system to dsl and to have it fail us during the holiday is a joke."

What ensued in the days leading up to and including February 14, Valentine's Day, was a catastrophic failure of the web-based Mercury Direct interface to the host computer housed in Downers Grove, IL - leaving FTD member florists to scramble as best they could to retrieve flower orders sold by FTD.com itself, other florists and via their own FTD-hosted websites.

"February 12 and 13 we had almost no orders sent to us from our web site to our POS system. We had to go to the web portal and print them out one by one. Each order we had to log in a second time to view the credit card information and hand writes the credit card #. Every order had to be typed into our POS system. The format they print out from the portal is hard to read."

Ironically, FTD members with older technology interfaces - dial-up MIMs and modems, were able to access the Downers Grove host. But their orders still had severe problems since the communications never made their way to the filling florists using web-based Mercury Direct.

"It's the new MNAPI system that frequently goes offline. Most of the time it's not noticed by the majority of shops - if it's offline for an afternoon in July, 80% of shops won't catch it, unless they become suspicious due to the lack of marketplace ad GEN messages. By our records, it was down on Feb 12, 13 and 14th.

"The biggest problem was that shops on dial-up were sending, but shops on Merc Direct weren't able to receive. Our orders were being bounced all over God's green earth, and resulted in many "That's not in our area" rejects."

FTD's Affiliate Order Gatherers Abandon Ship

Some FTD affiliates who also belonged to competing wire services like Telefora and 1-800-Flowers' Bloomnet, used those networks to send outgoing orders, with a number of florists expressed surprise at receiving Teleflora and Bloomnet orders from FTD's top affiliate resellers (order gatherers).

How much of an impact?

The numbers of lost, undelivered orders is unknown as of today but florists have shared their knowledge of the real and potential impact:

"From a very reliable source, there are two (flower) shops in one of the largest states that belong to FTD. One shop got 250 Mercury orders, the other 200 Mercury orders AT THE END OF THE DAY ON THE 14TH.

There was no way to reject the orders. JUST 2 SHOPS, 450 ORDERS. IF THERE WERE JUST 1,000 FTD SHOPS WHO HAD THE SAME PROBLEM WITH MERCURY, THAT WOULD BE 250,000 FLOWER BUYERS WHO MAY DECIDE TO NOT SEND FLOWERS AGAIN."

"To date (I) have spoken to over 70 florists that could not get orders through to us and several hundred coast to coast that suffered greatly."

FTD's Lack of a Back-up Plan

Information from former FTD insiders and tech savvy florists shows how such a catastrophic failure could have occured:

"(The) EFOS (Florist Electronic Order System) or the Real (OLD) Mercury System was not at fault.... It was the new interface that connects the internet to EFOS was the issue I have heard different stories, that it was hard ware, a Firewall that went bad. Too many orders for server to handle,... What ever...

The issue is equipment goes bad, telephone lines or cables get cut, but there needs to be some type of Redundancy which is missing... But let me let you they have redundancy for FTD.COM's 3 call centers"

"It's going to cost FTD a bundle now but they are going to have to set up a different system with pods in several areas so that if a problem occurs in one area orders can be automatically be rerouted through another pod and continue on it's merry way to the final destination (the recipient). Phone companies have systems like that in place.......when a major phone line goes down all long distance calls are redirected, it may slow things down a little but it usually doesn't kill the system and if enough pods are used it would only effect a small section of the landscape. It only makes common sense, when we order flowers for a major holiday most of us don't order everything from one supplier to all come in on the day before (I sure don't). FTD did and now it's really going to cost them big $$$ to fix along with a loss in unhappy members that will likely resign after this episode......not to mention the ton of customers that will not trust the floral industry any more.....Not just FTD but all flower vendors will suffer because all FTD's eggs were in one basket."

A Failure to Communicate

Frustration from florists abounds at FTD's inability to inform them the system was non-functioning.

"What I am finding appalling is the lack of them letting us know somehow there was a problem - but then again - how are they going to do that? By Mercury?"

Blame and Apologies

Most disturbing to FTD member florists are reports of consumers being told far-too-late that their Valentine's Day flower orders would not be delivered, and of an FTD spokeswoman blaming non-deliveries on lack of 'product availability'.

Sadly, many florists reported having the flowers and staffs in place to fill those orders - it's just that FTD technology Failed To Deliver consumer's purchase requests.

"Sorry does not cover the losses the shops incurred and we feel for the smaller shops that took a severe beating."

"Who was hurt in this whole mess up was any CONSUMER that made a purchase from FTD.com, OGs (order gatherers), or FTD florists.

FTD's technology failure and lack of communication with consumers and florists - both of whom trusted FTD to handle orders effectively and efficiently - looks to make this the most complaint-filled and costliest Valentine's Day in the ninety-seven year history of the company.