Third-party sites are selling flowers on our obituaries
That flower button is the business model. Obituary republication sites earn affiliate commissions on flower deliveries, "virtual candles", and premium placements attached to notices they copied from funeral homes. The family believes they are buying through you — the money goes to the site that scraped you.
What is actually being diverted
- Flower commissions the family thought supported your recommended florist.
- Sympathy-gift affiliate revenue on a page you wrote and photographed.
- The family relationship itself — condolence messages, RSVP counts, and guestbook entries land on the copy, and the family never sees them on your page. Some sites also charge families to "unlock" or "manage" the notice.
Multiply by every obituary you publish, and this is a real revenue and trust leak, not a nuisance.
How to shut it down
The lever is copyright, not commerce: the site can sell flowers, it cannot do so on your copyrighted text and photographs.
- Document the page — screenshot including the commerce widgets; they demonstrate commercial use, which forecloses fair-use arguments.
- DMCA to the site — the standard notice (full sequence here), with one added sentence noting the page monetizes the work through flower sales.
- Deindex from Google — this is the step that moves revenue back: families search the name, and the copy stops appearing above your original.
- Tell the family's florist question honestly — a line on your obituary pages ("Order flowers only through the links on this page — other websites reselling this notice are not connected to us or the family") converts confused families into reporters.
Common questions
Q: Can we demand the commissions the site earned on our obituaries?
A: The $20M Afterlife judgment shows damages are recoverable at scale through litigation. For a single home, the practical win is removal and deindexing; talk to an attorney if a specific site is monetizing you systematically.
Q: A family already bought flowers through a copy site and they never arrived. What do we tell them?
A: To dispute the charge with their card issuer, and that the page was not yours — with your family-communication template, not improvisation. Then file the takedown sequence against the page the same day.
Q: How do we find these pages before families do?
A: They appear within hours of publication, so detection has to be automatic. A free scan shows the current state; daily monitoring catches each new obituary's copies as they appear.
See where your obituaries are republished right now. The free scan checks known republication domains in minutes — no account, private report. Continuous monitoring: Obituary Watch from $29/month.
Related answers
- What is obituary piracy?
- Who owns the copyright to an obituary?
- Our funeral home got a Facebook "trademark violation" notice — is it real?
Obituary Watch provides monitoring assistance, not legal advice, and is not affiliated with any funeral home, streaming provider, or platform. Findings are similarity signals that require human confirmation — they are not accusations about any website or company.