What A Difference A Year Makes

A year or two ago florists started asking about the cloud, and the context was usually that they felt they needed a cloud-based POS system. How things have changed since then!

At a recent industry event, the biggest gathering of florists in the world with over 1000 in attendance, the cloud continued to come up, but this time in a very different way. The florists that are using cloud-based POS systems are looking to get away from them.

Why? Because what they were promised didn't begin to cover what they lost. For example...

 

  • They were promised that a cloud solution would make it easy for them to connect and work from home, but it also made the system painfully slow to use at the flower shop where it really mattered.

  • They were promised that cloud-based systems would be easier to maintain because they only required a browser, and no additional software. They didn't realize that if their internet connection went down, or the cloud servers went down, they would be without a system.

  • They were promised that cloud-based systems would be simple to learn and use, but nobody mentioned that this was largely because they were missing so many of the features that are taken for granted in the flower business. Things like automated printing for example – florists had to start printing every single document manually.

 

These are just some of the examples.

There are some great things about the cloud for for retail flower shops and it makes sense to take advantage of these when it works for the client. But, for most serious florists, the latest cloud-based floral POS systems involve just too much compromise.