What "Online Ordering" Actually Means for a Fall River Funeral Home

A funeral home is not a store, and the people who run them know it better than anyone. Fall River has directors who have buried three generations of the same family, who know which church a family belongs to before they say it, and who have sat in a kitchen on Eastern Avenue at eleven at night because someone needed them to. That is not a business you optimise. It is a vocation with a payroll attached.

So when someone says "e-commerce" to a funeral director, the word lands wrong. It sounds like a shopping cart. It sounds like adding a casket to a basket. Nobody wants that, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But here is the problem with letting the word do the deciding: while the phrase sounds inappropriate, the underlying work goes undone. And the underlying work is not selling. It is answering, in writing, at 2am, the questions a family is too raw and too polite to ask you out loud.

What the phrase actually covers#

Strip out the retail language and there are three things under this heading. None of them is a checkout.

One: your General Price List, on a web page. Not a PDF buried three clicks down. A page.

Two: the obituary page. On most of the funeral home sites I have looked at, it is the busiest page on the site, and it quietly hands the flower order to a national portal.

Three: forms and payment that work outside business hours. The pre-need enquiry, the deposit, the authorisation. The stuff that currently requires a phone call during the exact hours a grieving family is least able to make one.

That is the whole list. It is much smaller than the phrase implies.

What the FTC found when it looked#

In October 2022 the Federal Trade Commission released the results of a review of funeral provider websites, carried out as part of its Funeral Rule review. Those results are the reason this article exists.

Over sixty percent of the websites the FTC reviewed provided little to no information about their prices. That is not a Fall River finding — it is national, and the review took place during the height of the pandemic. But there is no reason to think the South Coast is an outlier, and every reason to think a family here behaves like a family anywhere: they look before they call.

What the law requires today, and what it does not#

This part gets misremembered constantly, so here it is plainly, from the FTC's own compliance guide.

The Funeral Rule requires you to give your General Price List to anyone who asks, in person — and to give it to them to keep. Showing them a binder is not compliance. The FTC's guide is explicit that "you must physically offer consumers a General Price List that they can keep and take home with them," and that the request does not have to come from a customer. Competitors, journalists and government agencies all count.

It also requires telephone price disclosure. If someone calls and asks about your prices, you must give them accurate information from your price lists. You cannot require a caller to give their name, address or phone number first, and you cannot require them to come in person to get prices.

What the Rule does not require is any of it online. The Rule took effect in 1984. As the FTC put it in 2022, because the rule was first issued in the 1980s, "it does not require them to provide price information online."

As of August 2026 the FTC has not issued a proposed or final amended Funeral Rule, and no online price-posting requirement is in effect. The 2022 advance notice, and the workshop the Commission held on proposed changes in September 2023, are the most recent rulemaking steps listed on its Funeral Rule page. No proposed rule has followed. I am not going to tell you a deadline is coming, because I cannot show you one.

But note what this means. You are already legally required to hand your price list to any stranger who walks in and asks for it. Publishing that same document on your own website gives away nothing you are not already obliged to give away. It just stops requiring a grieving person to drive across town to get it.

The phone is the fallback, and the phone is leaking#

The FTC called 278 randomly selected funeral providers across 2023 and published the results in November 2024. This is the part that should worry anyone relying on "they can just call us."

At least thirty-seven providers quoted different prices for the same services on different calls. Not dishonesty, in most cases. Just different people, different days, no single written source of truth. Which is precisely what a published price list is.

The Fall River piece: where the flower money goes#

Here is a local number I measured myself, and I am going to be precise about what it does and does not say.

In July 2026 I ran a technical audit of the 17 businesses Google returns for "florist in Fall River, MA." Ten had websites my checker could read. Nine of those ten offered no way to book or place an order through the site — the only path was a phone call, during business hours. Median mobile Largest Contentful Paint across the 14 sites I could measure was 7.2 seconds; Google's threshold for "good" is 2.5 seconds.

Two caveats, because they matter. Google's results for that search are not all florists and not all in Fall River — the 17 include a couple of businesses in neighbouring towns and a few that are not flower shops at all. And 11 of those 14 speed figures are lab estimates rather than field data from real visitors. The direction is not in doubt. The decimal points are not the point.

Now put that together with the obituary page. A family reads it at 10pm. They want to send flowers. Your obituary page has a "Send Flowers" button. On most funeral home sites I have looked at, that button goes to a national flower portal — because the local shop two streets away has no way to take an order at 10pm and the portal does.

So the order leaves the city. The usual arrangement is that the portal keeps a cut and passes the rest to a local florist to fulfil, which is how a family sometimes ends up with something that looks little like the photograph they paid for. I have not measured that margin and I am not going to pretend I have. What I have measured is the part that causes it: after 5pm, the local shop simply is not reachable through a screen.

That is a genuine e-commerce problem, and it is not solved by you building a shopping cart. It is solved by two local businesses agreeing on a link.

The fixes, cheapest first#

The one to do today, for free#

Take the General Price List you already hand to anyone who walks in. Export it as a PDF. Upload it to your website. Link to it from your main navigation with the words "Our Prices." Not "Pricing Information." Not "Learn More." Our Prices.

That is twenty minutes with whoever manages your site, and it puts you in the minority of funeral homes nationally that publish anything at all. Do the proper HTML page later — a PDF today beats a perfect page next quarter.

While you are in there, check that your phone number is a real tappable link and not typed as plain text. Four of the ten local businesses in that Fall River florist sample failed that check. It costs nothing to fix, and on a funeral home site it is very likely the button people reach for first.

Why this is worth doing even though nobody is making you#

The National Funeral Directors Association's 2025 consumer study, as reported by the trade press, found nearly 30% of families now complete all funeral arrangements online — while nearly 48% of those who planned online still needed a director's help, and 44.4% said they would not feel confident planning a funeral without one.

Read that carefully, because it is not an argument for automation. It is an argument that families now start online and finish with you. The website is not replacing the funeral director. It is the first ten minutes of the conversation, happening at midnight, before anyone is ready to speak to a human being.

For reference, the NFDA's 2023 price study put the median New England funeral with viewing and burial at $8,985, and with viewing and cremation at $7,023 — the highest of the nine census regions. A family facing a number like that at midnight is going to look for it somewhere. Better it is on your page, in your words, with your basic services fee explained, than assembled from a competitor's site and a message board.

If you run a funeral home in Fall River, Somerset, Swansea or Westport and you want a straight answer about what your site is doing at 2am — how fast it loads on a phone, whether Google can read it, where your obituary flower links actually go — I will look and tell you what I find. No pitch attached.

Joshua Amado, Avalon Partner · 774.559.8992 · Joshua.Amado@AvalonPartner.com

Sources: FTC, "FTC Seeks to Improve the American Public's Access to Funeral Service Prices Online," October 20, 2022; Statement of Chair Lina M. Khan on the Funeral Rule ANPR; FTC, "Complying with the Funeral Rule"; FTC staff report on the undercover Funeral Rule phone sweep, November 20, 2024; FTC warning letters to funeral homes, January 25, 2024; FTC 2025 inflation-adjusted civil penalty amounts; NFDA 2023 Member General Price List Study; NFDA 2025 Consumer Awareness & Preferences Study as reported by Connecting Directors.

Method for the local figures: on 26 July 2026 I audited the 17 businesses Google Places returns for "florist in Fall River, MA." Ten had sites my checker could read; three had no site; four blocked the checker and are excluded from every count rather than counted against them. Speed is mobile Largest Contentful Paint via Google PageSpeed Insights, field data where Google has enough real traffic to report it (3 of 14) and a lab estimate otherwise. The 2.5s and 4.0s thresholds are Google's, not mine. Anyone can reproduce this by pasting a URL into pagespeed.web.dev. No individual business is identified anywhere in this article, and none of them asked to be measured.