“The webshop was live within 2 weeks”

This week the Dutch Garden Centre Coppelmans opened the virtual doors to their new webshop. Due to the Covid-19 regulations, all non-essential stores are closed in the Netherlands, which created new online chances for the family company Coppelmans. It’s not a coincidence that Coppelmans decided to open a webshop with Garden Connect, as since 2003 Garden Connect has been their partner in online marketing.

During the first years, Garden Connect took care of the website for the 8 Coppelmans garden centres: a website with brochures, promotions, news items and email newsletters. “Coppelmans was one of the first garden centres that used our services. Patrick had strong ideas on how the website should look and we were happy to facilitate.” Frank de Lange, founder of Garden Connect and closely involved in the development of the website at the time. 
 

Start selling online or not?

Within the Coppelmans family, the start of a new webshop has been discussed multiple times. Despite that, they went ahead with it. But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t make any progress online. 

For a long time, Coppelmans Nuenen has had several webshops that were focused on specific product groups: “With my online “Winqels” as they were called I have made quite some progress for a few years. But the competition started to increase, I couldn’t combine the webshops with the brand Coppelmans and then I finally got the opportunity to build a new store. The focus went completely to my new store in Nuenen, but we did gain a lot of knowledge on e-commerce. We’re going to use that knowledge now for the full chain of Coppelmans stores.” Patrick Coppelmans explains. 
 

Football

Once you have known each other for a long time, some other topics will be discussed as well. Edwin remembers one of these moments very well: “The first time that I visited Patrick in Nuenen was in 2004. At that time PSV was doing a great job with Guus Hiddink in The Netherlands and in the Champions League. We started talking about football. My accent reveals that I’m from the Amsterdam area, Patrick couldn’t believe that I had a season ticket for PSV!”

Besides conversations about football, the collaboration with Garden Connect also led to the development of CIC Net: the internal network in which all establishments arrange their stocks, marketing and promotion materials, and communicate with each other. CIC Net has changed into BTC Net after BTC Retail was founded and still is an important link between the garden centres De Bosrand, Coppelmans and Tuinwereld. 
 

Webshop 

Back to 2021: the new webshop is ready and focuses on consumers in the area where the Coppelmans garden centres are located: “The first phone call with Garden Connect to build a webshop was in the beginning of January. Two weeks later we received the first orders: we highly appreciate the speed and flexibility, especially during these times.” as said by Patrick Coppelmans

“We will see how it goes now and we will continue expanding and professionalizing the website. The beginning is here and we’re very excited about that!”

 

You can find the website and webshop on www.coppelmans.nl