Working on the best buying experience together

For auction preparation, such as viewing auction offerings and marking interesting lots, buyers can now use a new app: RFH Pre-Auction. This new app is part of our digital platform Floriday. Sjors Huisink of plant wholesaler Huisink is one of the first to use RFH Pre-Auction. When developing new services, experience and feedback from users are very important. Sjors shares his.

As Sjors explains, Huisink is a small exporter-wholesaler of flowers and plants, with shops, garden centres and wholesalers in the Benelux as its sales market. Huisink used to trade only in plants, but over the past decade, some 60 per cent of its turnover has been in plants and 40 per cent in flowers.

For years, Sjors worked with FloraMondo for his purchases. Soon, however, FloraMondo will disappear as all trade will be brought together in Floriday. Since July 2024, Sjors has been doing his auction preparation through the Pre-Auction app and buying the auction presales offer through the Floriday Explorer. “Like any other buyer, we receive orders and go from there to find the best buying opportunity”, says Sjors. “If you need it urgently, you buy it through clock sales. And pricing, of course, often plays a role in the choice as well. But if I know it won't be at clock sales, I buy it through direct channels. I now do my auction presales through the Floriday Explorer.”

User experience is key

“The Pre-Auction app is integrated into Floriday, where I arrange other purchasing matters anyway. You can adjust some settings yourself to your liking. In ease of use and speed, I don't experience that much difference from FloraMondo”, says Sjors. Although this made the switch easier, he noticed that some useful functions he was used to in FloraMondo were missing in the beginning.

“For example, cut flower buyers need very different sorting characteristics than plant buyers. With cut flowers, the weight, maturity, length and diameter of the flower is important, while with plants it is the pot size, length, maturity, and the number of branches and flowers of the plants. For buyers of orchids, for example, it is essential to know the number of branches, and for other flowering plants it is about the number of flower heads or maturity. I pointed this out, and fortunately that filter option was then quickly added. I am grateful to the development team for listening to my feedback.”

Sjors has been in regular contact with Royal FloraHolland about these improvements. “The app started as a basic version, and based on user experiences, the development team adjusted certain things.” By developing not for, but with our users, we create an app that supports auction preparation as much as possible.

New improvements available immediately

Sjors continues: “An advantage of the new technology is apparently that this kind of functionality is added very quickly without the need for an extensive software update.”

He therefore advises other buyers to share their feedback too. “I am only one buyer and I probably look at it slightly differently than another buyer”, he says. Feedback from users like Sjors gives us a good idea of what is important to them. By actively engaging with our users, we know better what their needs are and what issues we need to address first.

Step by step to Floriday for auction preparation and auctioning
RFH Pre-Auction will be further rolled out among FloraMondo users in the coming period. Step by step, more and more functionalities will be added in the app, including the ability to give end customers access to RFH Pre-Auction. Besides replacing FloraMondo, KOA (Distance Buying) will also be replaced in due course. Buyers who buy through clock sales will soon be able to do so in the app RFH Auction. Users of FloraMondo and eventually KOA will be informed about this step by step.

Wondering how Floriday can already help with your auction preparations?
Log in to Floriday, go to your Settings and find ‘RFH Pre-Auction’ under ‘Apps & integrations’. Link the app and start your auction preparation via RFH Pre-Auction.

Wondering how to purchase your auction presales via Floriday?
Log in to Floriday, go to ‘Explorer’ and click on the ‘Auction Presales’ shortcut. Filter by the item you want, the grower you want and make your purchases straight away.

No Floriday account yet?
Go to the Floriday website.