Wesley Berry Flowers Sells Shopper $57.95 Arrangement, Tells Local Florist to Deliver Just $37.95 in Flowers     1/21/12

Wesley Berry Flowers of Commerce MI operates floral products websites under several different names. One such site is flowers-nationwide.com.

Flowers-nationwide.com is currently running an offer on group buying site KGBDeals.com claiming to discount $25 off purchases by selling ‘$40 worth of flowers for $15’ vouchers.

Sounds like a real deal but for a few pesky details:

1.    The ‘regular’ prices are inflated by approximately $13 - $20 above the suggested retail prices of the Teleflora affiliate products shown on their site.

2.    The service charge and handling fee (H.C.) tacked on to each order add another $18+ to the total cost. Note: these fees are not for delivery of the actual flowers and are kept by Wesley Berry Flowers. 

3.    The local florists who make and deliver these orders are only obligated to fill to the value provided to them by Wesley Berry Flowers, so if the orders are for less than local shops charge their own customers for the products and local delivery charges, the stores can substitute lower-priced vases and use less flowers.

Here’s the flowers-nationwide.com offer from KGB Deals:

And the voucher received upon purchase:

One shopper visited the flowers-nationwide.com site and selected Teleflora’s Brilliant Birthday Blooms Arrangement priced at $57.95. How much does Teleflora.com (the company who actually created the design) sell that same arrangement for? $44.95.

In fact, Wesley Berry Flowers’ other sites also show inflated prices to ‘discount’ that same arrangement.  

Here’s the purchaser receipt from flowers-nationwide.com for the Brilliant Birthday Blooms: 

Bottom line: The flowers-nationwide.com shopper paid $50.98 ( $35.98 plus $15.00 already spent for the voucher through KGB Deals) to get a $57.95 Brilliant Birthday Blooms delivered. Savings of $7 instead of $25?

Not really. When Wesley Berry Flowers sent the order through Teleflora’s Dove network to a local florist to make and deliver, the shop was told to provide a total value of just $37.95. Wesley Berry Flowers shorted the recipient (and the buyer) $20 in flowers and service by advertising they'd receive $57.95 in floral products. 

These are precisely the types of deceptive and misleading marketing tactics that have earned Wesley Berry Flowers myriad complaints and forced more and more local flower shops to say ‘no’ to accepting their orders for local fulfillment.

We urge Teleflora to finally put a stop to this misleading advertising run by one of their high volume affiliates. Consumers shouldn’t be fooled by inflated prices, phony discounts and under-valued orders, especially on such a large scale.

We also urge KGB Deals to take a very close look at the deals being offered nationally by any flower company who wants to run a coupon. Groupon learned it’s lesson the hard way last Valentine’s Day.

Reputation Management by Spoofing The Better Business Bureau 1/12/ 12

Just when we thought we'd seen every trick in the order gatherer book, Wesley Berry Flowers has upped the game by spoofing the BBB's (Better Business Bureau's) page about their company so Wesley Berry can collect their many complaints with the BBB being none the wiser.

One of Wesley Berry Flowers' of Commerce, Michigan's keys to success in gathering out-of-area orders (while advertising to imply they're physically located in nearly every city in the US) is to highly promote an A+ rating from the BBB - but that rating had fallen to an A- in the fall of 2011. A few hundred complaints this last year alone can do that. And more than 350 over the last 3 years.

Wesley Berry Flowers copied an old version of the BBB's page about their company, deleting the complaint details of course, and then worked diligently over the last year to SEO (search optimize) the page to rank in Google above the BBB's real page about Wesley Berry Flowers.

Where do the complaints on Wesley Berry's fake BBB page go? Just look at the page code to see they're forwarded right to the company, cbaetz@800wesleys.com so the BBB never hears from the many, many upset, disappointed consumers. 

How successful has this spoof been?

Note that the real BBB only received 2 complaints during December 2011, yet other consumer complaint sites were being inundated with tales of Wesley Berry Flowers' non-delivery and poor substitutions during the same period:

Wesley Berry Flowers from FlowerComplaint.com  - received 51 complaints since
12/1/11

Wesley Berry Flowers on PissedConsumer.com - received 32 complaints since
12/1/11

Wesley Berry Flowers 'hook' is to advertise '$20 off' all their products across multiple sites:
800wesleys.com
flowers-nationwide.com
flowerdeliveryexpress.com
americanfloraldelivery.com
wesleyberryflowers.com
www.wesleyberryflowers.net
wesleyberryflowers.net


A close inspection of the floral designs shows their use of Teleflora affiliate images with most being priced nearly $20 above Teleflora's own suggested retail prices. So the 'deals' basically just get shoppers back to what they'd pay most anywhere else on the web (which is more than they'd pay direct through most local flower shops).

Really, not deals at all.

Wesley Berry doesn't deliver those orders to distant cities, they just take a cut of the product prices and pocket the service fees and HC (handling charges) piled on in the shopping cart. They don't control prices or inventory of local delivering florists so substitutions are more likely the norm.

Does the BBB have a policy against companies spoofing their pages? We sure hope so.

Does marking up products to discount them to 'regular' prices violate BBB (and FTC)  policy? We're pretty sure it does.

Let's hope the Better Business Bureau takes a lot closer look at the types of companies they rate 'A+', especially this one.