Update: 4 tips on selling plants online
How can you start selling plants online? And if you already do so, how can you improve your marketing, sales and business process?
We’re happy to share 4 strategies you need to adopt to successfully sell plants online.
1. Logistics of selling plants online
Shipping olive trees from Southampton to Edinburgh can be a headache. But why would you start with such a complicated process? Plenty of customers in your own area are searching for plants online, so start with a click & collect and local delivery service. That makes your life a lot easier, and chances are customers will visit your physical store as well.
Having an iconic delivery truck helps to get some attention while delivering your plants:
If you struggle to figure out what packaging you can use to ship plants, you can watch our YouTube video about unboxing houseplants (the video is in Dutch, so you might want to turn on subtitles!):
2. Optimize Local findability
By focusing on your customers in the area, the following sales and delivery processes will be way easier: you can either offer click & collect options, or set-up a local delivery service.
How do you make sure the people in the area will actually find your plants? With Local SEO we optimize your webshop for specific placenames in the area, so the potential customers with an intention to actually buy plants near them, will find your products online.
We’re hosting a webinar about this subject in March, you can sign up here.
3. Photos of plants
Unlike in your brick & mortar store, your online customers cannot touch your plants and see them from all sides. Therefore, it is crucial to provide good impressions of the plants so that the visitor can get a good idea of what they can expect from their purchase. At Garden Connect we do stock over 25,000 proper plant photos. Photos are key for online customers, so pay attention to them!
Having multiple photos will help to make a purchase decision. Also, we advise you to have at least one photo of how the plant looks in reality, once it’s planted and blooming.
On many webshops selling plants, you can only see the plant in its’ current state, which is often not too inspiring. Therefore, include inspirational images that inspire your visitor.
There are several other ways to give a good impression of the plants. In addition to product images, augmented reality offers the perfect solution.
Augmented reality enables your webshop visitors to try out the plant in their living room or garden without receiving it first. Using the camera function on the smartphone or tablet, a 3D model of the product is placed in the real world. This way, your potential buyer can find out if the plant fits in the living room. Using AR will not only increase conversions but will also reduce the number of returns. Learn more about our Augmented Reality solution.
4. Navigation & product filters
Make it easy to navigate since most modern consumers don’t have plant knowledge. Sun or shade? Evergreen? What are the flowering colours? What will the maximum height be? When does the plant flower? Does it require dry or wet soil? Having easy navigation in your website with a range of product filters helps customers to pick the right plant - even without any knowledge.
Cowell's Garden Centre is using very visual navigation on their plant webshop:
In case you want to have your own plant webshop, have a look at our webshops.
We're specialised in building webshop to sell plants online and are working for garden centres in the Netherlands, Belgium, UK, Ireland, Canada & other parts of the world.
Bonus tip: create Google-friendly web content
Our bonus tip on how to sell plants online is about Google-friendly content. There are many webshops showing descriptions of plants but they don't have a Google-friendly description. And we can understand they don't have it since there are 1,000's of plants and writing unique, Google-friendly content will take years.
At Garden Connect, we developed an innovative solution to solve this issue. So yes, we can provide you with 1,000's of unique texts about plants as well as photos you can use to sell plants online in 7 languages. And no, we're not out-generating these texts since that will look weird. Have a look at our plant data or send an e-mail to our founder Edwin on edwin@gardenconnect.com to learn more.
