If you went online to order that Valentine's Day bouquet, you probably found plenty of Web vendors wanting to send one to your sweetie. The $15 billion floral industry is blossoming with new competition, but what's happening on the Web is only part of it.
When FTD.com and 1-800-Flowers.com started selling flowers online six years ago, they introduced a new way to place orders but stuck with the old way of filling them: by farming them out to the nearest florist. Now a new patch of online merchants, including Proflowers.com and Martha Stewart, are pushing...