A cheap bouquet and a cheap delivery are two different things, and no service on this page is best at both. Here is what each one starts at, what it adds for delivery, and which of the two figures it declines to publish.
Checked on
Cheapest first, delivery charge beside it
Read the two money columns together or not at all. The service with the lowest bouquet on this page is also one of the three that will not tell you what delivery costs until you are at checkout.
Relay network
eFlorist
Cheap on the shelf. The delivery cost is the unknown.
Your order is passed to a local florist, who makes it up and delivers it. You are buying the network, not the bouquet in the photo.
From
€28.99
Delivery
Not published
Delivery included in the bouquet price plus a service fee; the fee amount is only shown at checkout
Same day
13:00
Dublin. Dublin only, including Howth, Malahide, Swords, Tallaght, Lucan and other suburbs
Next day
21:00
The latest next-day cutoff of any service compared here
Delivers
6 days a week, deliveries between 9am and 9pm, Republic of Ireland only
7 days, the only service here with published Sunday delivery (15.00 charge, 9am to 2pm)
Figures read from each service's own delivery pages. "Not published" means the service does not state a figure, so you only see it at checkout.
The arithmetic nobody puts on a product page
Two services on this page start under thirty-five euro. Neither publishes a delivery charge. Two more start in the high thirties and forties and print a flat charge on the site, which means you can add the order up in your head before you open your wallet. Once you do that arithmetic the running order changes: the cheapest thing on the shelf is not the cheapest order, and it might not even be close.
There is a second, quieter cost at the bottom of the range. The delivery charge comes out of the order before anyone buys a stem. On a bouquet in the low thirties with a flat charge on top, the flowers themselves are working with barely twenty euro. Through a relay network, that twenty then has to cover the local florist's wrapping, their time and their diesel. This is why cheap delivered bouquets so often look thinner in the hand than on the screen, and it is not the florist being mean.
The supermarket sitting in the corner of this argument
Irish supermarkets sell perfectly good bouquets at roughly five to twenty euro, and they sell an enormous number of them. Around ninety-five percent of cut flowers sold in this country are imported, and a supermarket bunch and a website bouquet often start their week in the same Dutch auction. The stems are not the difference. The difference is arrangement, presentation, a written card and the fact that someone else drives.
So the fair way to look at a delivered bouquet is as roughly twenty euro of flowers plus twenty to thirty euro of service. Put that way, some errands are obviously worth it and some obviously are not. If you are seeing the person on Friday, buy a bunch on Friday. If the flowers have to be at a house in Ballina on a Tuesday afternoon and you are in Dublin, no supermarket in the country can help you.
Where a cheap delivered bouquet earns its keep
Spend the delivery charge when
The address is not one you can get to, and the day is not one you can move.
It is going somewhere you should not walk into: a ward, a funeral home, a wedding morning.
A written card is half the point of it.
You want the option of ringing a named florist near the door if it goes wrong.
Keep the money when
Your ceiling is under thirty euro, where delivery eats a third of it.
You will see the person inside two days.
You want one particular flower in season and a photograph on a website will not give it to you.
A letterbox parcel would do, in which case pay nothing for delivery and spend the difference on the flowers.
If your ceiling is a round number rather than the lowest possible price, thefifty euro page works out what is left for flowers once each service takes its delivery charge out.
Questions people ask
What is the cheapest way to have flowers delivered in Ireland?
Ringing a florist in the town you are sending to, if you can find one and get through during shop hours. Of the national services, the lowest totals come either from a letterbox subscription service that charges nothing for weekday delivery, or from a relay network where the local florist sets their own charge. The flat-fee online florists are dearer per order but you know the figure before you commit.
Are supermarket flowers as good as delivered ones?
Frequently, yes, because roughly ninety-five percent of cut flowers sold in Ireland are imported and much of the trade buys through the same channels. A supermarket bouquet at five to twenty euro is not worse value than a forty euro delivered one; it is a different purchase. You are paying the difference for someone to arrange it, write the card and put it at a door you are not standing at.
Why is the delivery charge sometimes more than a third of the order?
Because a van has to drive to the address whatever is in the back of it. On a cheap bouquet the delivery is the same work as on a dear one, so it takes a much bigger bite. Under about thirty euro the charge stops being a fee and starts being most of what you spend, which is the point at which buying the flowers yourself is usually the better call.
Do cheap bouquets look like the photograph?
Less reliably than dearer ones, and least reliably through a relay network, where a local florist has to make something up to the value of the order. At the bottom of the range the value left for stems after delivery and the network cut is small. If a photograph matters, order from a service that makes the arrangement itself and spend a little more.