Happy Valentine's Day... Surprise!!!...

Wow... this year I actually decided to order something... ONLINE... for the first time. It also happened to be a Valentine's gift for my Overseas friend :D. So I go online to Google and do a search on 'Singapore flowers'. Me being a typical guy ended up sticking with one of the first 2 hits that I got :p so much for shopping around...

First hit: Prince's

I browsed through the site and was put off at the fact that almost everything was in the 3 digit range. Now, yes I think that if you're going to give a gift then give the best, and spare no expense. But I'm also a minimalist of sorts, simple+beautiful=perfect ;) the fact that I'm going to be flying to M'sia and S'pore and broke when I come back was another good deterrent. They had interesting assortments, some of them nicer than others... but I found most of them to be just average, considering the prices.

Second hit: Flora2000

Flora2000 offered (in my opinion) a nicer, simpler selection. Looking back, it may have just been the pictures that they used for their site that sold me :p The colors are more vibrant and they're all set on a nice white background. The arrangements were more appealing as well. Yeah yeah, I know, I'm not supposed to be thinking about what I would like personally... I'm supposed to be thinking about HER and what I think she would like, right? It's hard :p The other thing that attracted me to this site was the fact that most of the prices that were listed were in the 2 digit mark... which was nice for my pockets :D

I ended up purchasing the assortment that's pictured in my previous post. Simple... Classic Dozen.

A nice feature available on the site is a 24x7 Live Chat feature incase you need assistance in placing your order. I actually had a chance to try it out as I needed assistance was curious to see if it would work ;). The time it took for an operator to pick up the request was no too long taking into consideration it was Valentine's day (in Singapore) already. By the time the chat was initiated less than 10 minutes had passed. The only thing that bothered me was the fact that the person on the other side, a) Couldn't type to save his life or b) Didn't have ANY information on-hand which resulted in longer waits than should be expected for reasonably simple questions. To tell you the truth, I'm certain there's only one person taking requests for the site...

One thing I will mention though is for you people to be observant and find out what currency prices are listed as. Seeing as Prince's prices were listed in SGD I just assumed that the other site was also in SGD. Soooo, needless to say, when I did the conversion I chose SGD to CDN when it should have been USD to CDN. You can imagine my shock when I saw the little blurb in the Q&A section: "All prices are in United States Dollars (USD)" Yeah, great... thanks for making it obvious. For those of you who might not know, the big difference is that one conversion goes _DOWN and one goes ^UP. I guess it's my fault for not realizing that /Singapore was a sub-section of the site. there you have it, you have been warned :p

After all was said and doneI went home excited at the fact that (hopefully) someone would be pleasantly surprised. I even stayed up waaaaaaay past my bedtime chatting on MSN in hopes of being awake when the flowers got delivered. Nope, no such luck :( As it turns out they couldn't make the delivery on time and Jacq didn't have the chance of getting embarassed in the presence of her co-workers :p I was happy when I received her sms at 6:32am :D The flowers were indeed delivered, and in a timely fashion I might add. (There was a disclaimer in red stating that Valentine's Day orders would be delivered between Feb 14th and Feb 16th... too bad they didn't make one as prominent for the pricing as well :p)

Now I'm just waiting for her to send a photo of the Roses in all their true glory (with her in the picture, of course!)

And here it is!!!