How much does a wire service actually take?

On one Michigan shop's statements across three months, commission and fees together came to $13,318.35 out of $32,814.74 in orders, and 59 cents of every dollar reached the shop before flowers, labor or delivery. That is one shop over three months, not an industry average.

Can I leave a wire service and keep my phone number and customers?

Your phone number, your customer list and your domain registration are usually yours, but the website and the customer records held inside a vendor platform often are not portable. Check who the domain is registered to before anything else.

I am tired of my wire service. What are my options?

Q: I am tired of my wire service. What are my options?

Four: cut unused line items, stop paying to send while still receiving orders, join a second network alongside the first, or leave entirely. Reading three months of your own statements is what tells you which one applies.

Four of them, and only one is leaving.

You have four options: cut the line items you are not using, stop paying to send while still receiving, join a second network, or leave. Most shops we have talked with start with the first because it needs no notice period and no new vendor, and because the statement usually shows something being paid for that nobody remembers buying.

What is actually being taken

Before choosing between the four, read three months of statements. One Michigan shop we work with had an April statement where $3,561.02 went to the wire service in a single month. It decomposes like this:

Line	April
Commission withheld	$2,448.73
Teleflora technologies	$742.63
Membership services	$149.95
Directory and marketing	$157.34
Other member services	$62.37

Commission is the largest single item and it is the one most often left out when a shop adds up what it pays, because it never appears as a bill. It is withheld from the order before the money arrives.

Across three months at that shop: $13,318.35 of $32,814.74 in orders went to commission and fees, and 59 cents of every dollar reached the shop. The three months read 56, 62 and 58 cents. That is what reached the shop before flowers, labor or delivery, which is not what it kept. One shop, three months, read off its own statements.

Option 1: stay, and cut what you are not using

The fee lines are itemised and some of them are optional. Directory advertising, marketing add-ons and technology charges are separate line items from membership, and a shop can usually drop one without touching the others. This needs no notice period.

Start by matching every recurring line on page 2 of the statement to something you can name. The lines nobody can explain are the first candidates.

Option 2: stop paying to send, keep receiving

Sending an order out through the network and filling one that comes in are separate transactions with separate economics. A shop that stops sending and keeps filling removes the outbound commission and the per-message charges while keeping the incoming volume.

What this costs you is the ability to send a customer's order to another town through the network. Whether that matters depends on how many of those you do in a year, which your statement will tell you.

Option 3: join a second network

A florist's right to belong to more than one network is court-ordered history rather than a favor. The Department of Justice brought antitrust actions against the dominant network in 1956 and again in 1966, and a 1990 modified judgment barred it from restricting membership anticompetitively. In 1995 the DOJ petitioned over an incentive program that steered florists away from competing services, and the program was stopped permanently.

Running two means you can compare what each actually delivers on your own statements for a quarter, which is a stronger basis for leaving than a brochure.

Option 4: leave

Leaving means replacing three things the network currently supplies: incoming order volume, the website, and the payment plumbing. The order they are replaced in matters more than the decision itself.

Own the assets first. Check who your domain is registered to. Many shop domains are registered to the shop but run on the vendor's name servers, which means the registration is yours and the site is not.
Build the direct channel before you need it. Your own site, your own checkout, your customer list in your possession.
Replace the volume. This is the slow part, and it is the reason to start while the network revenue is still arriving.
Then exit.

A website supplied by your wire service is rented. If you stop paying, the site stops. Check the registration on your domain today; it is a two minute check and it decides how much of the above is even available to you.

What to do this week

Pull three consecutive monthly statements and add up two numbers: total orders, and commission plus fees. The ratio between them is the only figure in this conversation that describes your shop rather than someone else's.

See where your shop actually stands

The Florist Visibility Check looks at your Google profile, your website and whether an AI assistant names you when someone asks for a florist in your town. It is free.

Run the Visibility Check

Sources

U.S. v. Florists' Telegraph Delivery Ass'n (DOJ, E.D. Mich., No. 56-15748), 1956 consent decree; U.S. v. Florists' Transworld Delivery Ass'n (No. 66-28784), second consent decree entered 1969; modified final judgment, E.D. Mich., 1990; DOJ contempt petition over the "FTD Only" program, settled 2 August 1995.
Statement figures: one Michigan shop's Teleflora member statements, April to July 2026, read line by line. n=1, three months. Every figure above is read off those statements and none of it is estimated or averaged across the industry.
Figures are stated as "reached the shop", meaning gross orders less commission and fees, before flowers, labor or delivery.

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