Flower shop website: which one you need and how to choose the route

A flower shop website is built in one of three ways: you put it together yourself on a website builder, you commission a custom build from a studio, or you subscribe to a ready-made platform. The choice is not decided by design or launch price but by three questions: who will update prices and stock every day, who owns the domain and the customer data, and where the catalogue takes its data from if you already keep stock in another system.

What kind of flower shop website you need

Start not with choosing a contractor but with what the customer has to do on the page. That decides the price, the timeline and how much work lands on your staff.

A website for florists and studios

For a florist working to order, what matters is a portfolio by occasion (weddings, birthdays, interiors, corporate work), a clear "from" price and a quick way to get in touch. A cart gets in the way here: an arrangement is discussed, not dropped into a basket. A studio site can honestly be built on a builder over a weekend, and there is no point paying for development.

Shops and wholesalers

Once you have a chilled display and deliveries twice a week, everything changes. The range lives three or four days, rose prices move from one delivery to the next, and a catalogue that knows nothing about stock starts telling lies by Friday evening. A wholesaler whose buyers are shops and florists with their own terms needs separate logic, covered in the guide to a B2B portal for flower wholesalers.

What every flower shop website must have

Whichever route you take, some things must be on the page, or the customer goes next door.

1. A catalogue with prices and availability. "Price on request" on every item puts retail customers off. The exception is cut flowers whose price changes daily: there a call button is more honest than yesterday's figure.
2. Your own photos. Customers recognise stock photos and then stop trusting the rest. A phone, a white background and daylight by a window are enough.
3. Delivery and its terms. Zones, times, cost, and the cut-off for same-day orders. These are the questions people send most often.
4. Payment. Which methods and when: at order, on collection, by invoice for businesses. Consumer prices are shown including VAT; trade prices can be shown excluding VAT if clearly marked. Check the details for your country with your accountant.
5. Contacts and legal pages. A phone that gets answered, a messaging channel, opening hours, a map pin, your company details, terms of sale and a privacy policy. Under GDPR you need to say what customer data you collect and why, and analytics or advertising cookies need consent.
6. A mobile version. People choose a bouquet on their phone in the evening, and a trade buyer checks stock from the warehouse floor.

Test the last point yourself: open the catalogue on your phone, find a 60 cm rose, add it to the cart and go to checkout. If that takes more than a minute or the buttons are too small for a thumb, the customer will leave before you do.

Three routes: builder, custom build, platform

Website builder. You rent the engine and a template and fill in products, photos and texts yourself. The upside is speed and a low start: a florist website template looks decent on the first evening. The downside is that everything is updated by hand, complex logic (personal prices, reservations for a delivery date, several shipments in one order) usually cannot be set up, and a link to your stock system is either limited or works through file uploads.

Custom build. A studio builds an online shop around your processes. You can get exactly what you need, including a link to your accounting system. But you pay for everything you specify, including mistakes in the brief, and after launch you depend on the contractor: every change in your accounting software or discount rules means a new quote.

Ready-made platform. The engine is shared, but the look, the domain and the data are yours. It is built for one trade, so the things flowers need are already there, and you pay a subscription instead of a one-off development fee. Petala works this way: the website and app run on your own domain with your logo and colours, and customers do not see the platform's name. Choosing the system behind the shop is covered in the guide to flower shop software.

What a flower shop website costs and how long it takes

The figures below are indicative for autumn 2026 and vary by country; agencies in Amsterdam, Paris or London charge more. Compare not the launch cost but the total for the first year, including your own time.

What is missing from the table still costs money. On a builder it is your time: a catalogue of 300 items with photos and prices takes several evenings, then daily stock edits. With a custom build it is time spent on the brief and on acceptance testing, usually yours and your senior florist's. A platform also needs checking: prices and stock are reconciled with you before customers see them.

Petala has no commission on orders. Custom work on your own price logic or your own layout is quoted separately after a call. Current terms are on the Petala pricing page.

Who owns the website and the customers

People rarely ask this at launch and often regret it two years later, when they want to change contractor or plan.

The domain. It should be registered to you or your company, and the login to the registrar should be yours, not the freelancer's who built the shop three years ago. That applies to all three routes.

Code and design. On a builder, the engine and template belong to the builder: you can leave, but you rebuild the shop from scratch, usually taking only a product export. With a custom build the code is yours if the contract transfers the rights and the hosting accounts are in your name; without that clause your own shop may turn out to belong to someone else. On a platform the engine stays with the platform, while the domain, logo and data are yours. Ask any platform before signing what happens to the shop if you cancel.

Products, customers and GDPR. The route where data lives in your own system wins here. You are responsible for your customers' personal data, so you need a data processing agreement with whoever hosts it and a way to export or delete a customer's records on request. If the platform publishes a customer app, check that it goes out under your name in the App Store and Google Play and stays yours.

Linking the website to stock, prices and orders

For a shop selling cut flowers this is the key question of the whole choice. If someone copies stock levels from the stock system into the website admin every morning, within a month they will do it every other day, and customers will start getting calls saying the roses are gone.

Builder. Some builders accept product imports or have plug-ins for common accounting packages: products and prices come through, sometimes stock. Personal prices per contract, pre-orders for a delivery date and holding stock during checkout usually cannot be set up this way.

Custom build. Any integration can be built, but it is the most expensive and slowest part of the project, and it needs upkeep: update your accounting software and the link needs testing again.

Platform. In Petala the catalogue comes from the Petala CRM or from an integration with your own CRM or accounting system via Excel/CSV and API, so prices and stock come from that system. A logged-in trade customer sees their own contract price, while guests see the open price. The cart applies the minimum order sum and personal discount, splits the order into what ships from stock and what comes with an incoming delivery, and holds stock for 30 minutes during checkout.

A note on orders: a web order does not post itself into your accounting system. It reaches a manager in the CRM with all items and prices, and from there it is processed as usual. Plan the rota so that someone handles orders through the day.

How to build a flower shop website: step by step

1. Describe the buyer and their path. A retail customer on a phone, a florist with a trade account, a business paying by invoice: each takes a different route through the catalogue.
2. Count the range. 40 bouquets and 3,000 cut-flower lines are different jobs. The more items and the more often availability changes, the more manual updates cost.
3. Decide where the data comes from. If products and prices already live in a system, look for a route where the catalogue flows from it. If you keep no records at all, sort that out first, or the shop has nothing to show; the guide to flower shop inventory explains how.
4. Compare the three routes with the table above, using your own numbers: what an hour of staff time spent on stock edits costs and how many orders a month you expect.
5. See it working. Ask for a demo with real flower stock, not a generic theme. The catalogue, cart and buyer account of a wholesaler are on the demo website.
6. Prepare photos and texts early. No route speeds this up: delivery, payment, returns, contacts, your own pictures.

Common launch mistakes

A catalogue without availability. A customer chooses and pays, and an hour later gets a call offering a substitute. One case like that cancels the advertising you paid to bring them in.

A beautiful home page and an empty catalogue. The money went on a slider and animation, while product pages lack stem length, origin and pack size. For a trade buyer those details matter more than any banner.

Prices you cannot maintain. Cut flowers that get dearer before holidays get a fixed price that nobody revisits. In the week before Valentine's Day such a shop sells at a loss.

Orders nobody reads. The form sends an email to an inbox opened once a day. Decide before launch who handles orders and how fast.

A shop with no promotion. A website does not bring customers on its own: you need map listings, ads and work with regulars. That is covered in the guide to flower shop marketing.

If you run a wholesale business or a shop that also sells to the trade, and you need personal prices, pre-orders for a delivery date and a buyer account, get in touch and we will walk through how it would work with your range.