Most florist shops underprice delivery for the first six months and never quite recover. The reason is almost always the same: delivery is treated as one flat fee instead of a per-zone calculation that reflects what each delivery actually costs.
This guide walks through the model Floraboard's customers use, then shows how to set it up in the platform in under an hour.
Why per-zone delivery pricing matters
A €10 delivery fee is profitable in the city center where you can do five drops per hour. It's loss-making in suburbs 25 km away where you can do one drop per hour and the driver fills up the tank doing it. If you charge €10 flat:
- Customers in the suburbs love you. They place the orders that drain margin the fastest.
- Customers in the center subsidize them. They notice eventually.
- Your driver routes are inefficient because the system doesn't know which orders to bundle.
Per-zone pricing fixes all three problems at the same time.
The three zone primitives
Floraboard supports three ways to define a zone. Pick the one that matches the geography, not the one that looks neatest on a map.
ZIP zones use postal codes. They are the cleanest option in countries where postal codes are small and reliable (Germany, the Netherlands, parts of the US). You list the ZIPs that belong to a zone and the system handles the rest.
Polygon zones are hand-drawn shapes on a map. Use them for irregular city centers, gated neighborhoods, or boundaries that don't follow postal codes. They take five minutes to draw.
Radius zones are circles of a given distance from a center point. They are the easiest way to cover suburbs that don't have meaningful postal-code boundaries, or to draw quick "near my shop" zones.
You can mix all three in one storefront. Floraboard resolves which zone an address belongs to at checkout.
Pricing each zone
A useful rule of thumb: each zone's price should cover your driver cost per drop, your vehicle cost, and a flat margin. Don't try to be clever — three tiers is enough.
- Tier 1 (close): Free above a minimum order, low fee below it.
- Tier 2 (medium): A fee that covers your cost. No free option.
- Tier 3 (far): A higher fee plus a minimum order that makes the run worthwhile.
The minimum-order rule on Tier 3 is what makes the math work. Without it, a single €25 bouquet to a distant suburb costs you money. With a €60 minimum, the bouquet becomes either an order you want, or an order that goes to a competitor — both of which are better outcomes than losing money.
Time-slots per zone
Once zones are set, attach time-slots to each one. A typical setup:
- Inner-city zones: 1-hour slots all day, last cut-off 2pm.
- Medium zones: 2-hour slots, last cut-off 12pm.
- Far zones: 4-hour slots, next-day only.
Different cut-off times per zone is the lever that lets you say yes to same-day orders without burning out your couriers.
Common mistakes
The most expensive mistake is one giant "city" zone with one flat fee. The second most expensive is overlapping zones with no priority rule — Floraboard handles overlap by picking the most specific zone, but if your zones are messy, customers will sometimes get a fee that doesn't match what they expected.
Test three real addresses before going live. It catches the majority of mistakes in twenty minutes.
What you ship at the end
A storefront where:
- Every address is in exactly one zone with a known fee.
- Slots and cut-offs reflect what your couriers can actually do.
- Minimum orders protect you on far-out deliveries.
- Drivers see grouped, near-each-other deliveries on their daily run.
That's it. The hard part is the modeling decisions, not the software. Once the model is right, the platform does the routing.