When our customers plan to buy flowers for the holiday shipments, they would like to have the clearest possible understanding of the market situation, including the possible percentage of the order fulfillment and price policy.

As we have already mentioned several times in our web news, we can not forecast everything with complete confidence, but taking into consideration many years of our professional experience we can forecast the possible typical situations on the flower market.

For example, the customer placed an order beforehand to receive flowers several days in advance before the planned start of holiday sales in his city, so having a margin of time. As a rule the prices are really high before holidays since this is the seasonal peak demand for flowers all over the world’s flower markets. This is the way the majority of the wholesalers prefer to work in order to manage risks. In this case, the client has complete control over the situation regarding his/her order, and has several days left to make some adjustments if necessary.

Some customers decide to purchase flowers just before holidays. In this case, most shipments have already left farms, some of them have already been shipped to Amsterdam and are going to their final destinations.

There are two main risk factors in this case:

• There is a chance to receive your holiday shipment late in case of delays in flights, loadings, customs procedures etc
• Price policy. When buying later, for receiving flowers just before the holidays, in case there are still enough flowers available on the market, the prices can often be lower since the main shipments have already been delivered. However, there is a risk “to miss the boat”, when flowers are sold out and the new harvest has not yet had time to grow, and prices remain really high. We can just feel sorry about this total fiasco… But it was a customer’s conscious decision, maybe next time luck will be on your side…

We perform the challenging purchase tasks, but it is the customer who has to choose the dates for holiday shipments. The customer makes a decision, we just recommend and try to offer the most reliable delivery options.

We almost always consider the preliminary farms holiday price lists as greatly overestimated. Whatever the case, it is the customer who has to make a decision.

Usually we send letters to our customers with the request to confirm or to cancel the purchase of flowers at prices offered by farms for holiday shipments. Some customers accept those definitely high prices. Possible results:

• In case of low production at the flower market (for example, due to cold sunless weather), the first choice will be the most favorable one: expensive but tasty and surely completed order from the reliable farms.
• In case there are a lot of flowers available at the market, risk-taking customers who decide to wait, get the best price for flowers.

It is worth mentioning again that the customer has to think carefully about the delivery peculiar features as well (possible problems with booking spaces for the best flights, delays in flights, loadings, customs procedures) and consider all the risks.