This is an ongoing blog. More added each day.
There are many independent gardeners selling plants online. Many fail because the market is overloaded and also shipping costs and losses due to plant damage are very high.
Here are a few tips to help you avoid the pitfalls of online selling.
Shipping
Gear up. Boxes need to be sturdy. Packing materials must be cheap but also effective in protecting your plants. Choose one size plant pot. 4 inches is the easiest, then order boxes 4x4x 16 inches. Or 4 x4x18 and/ or 4x4 x 20 inches. Length depends on the size of your plant. Boxes over 20" long cost way more to ship, so don't go that long.
Recycled tissue paper is the most flexible packing material. It comes in various sizes from Nashville Wraps.
Most useful tissue size for wrapping is 36x24 inches for four inch pots. Nashville Wraps is my choice for price and reliability.
Weighing machine, tape measure, and packing tape with tape gun are non-optional extras.
Site preparation
Yes, buy 4 inch coex pots. The best are from Greenhouse Megastore. The lightest and most useful are the 4 inch round coex pint pots and I buy 1000+ at a time. They are especially good if you plan to grow your own plants. My trays come from local nurseries. 15 coex pots sit nicely in those trays. The big nurseries throw out trays, so go begging.
New pots are needed for a professional look and if you are growing plants, the extra depth of these pint pots is definitely a plus.
Potting soil is needed so that, especially if you're a Florida grower, you know you're not shipping soil nematodes and other soil-born insects or moulds. Miracle grow potting soil is easiest because it's lightweight and pours into pots.
An oil-change tray from your local Lowes will be ideal for potting indoors.
So If you want to own your own accredited nursery, this indoor space is important because in florida and possibly other states,inspectors do prefer indoor plant preparation for shipping.
You'll be touching potting soil a lot. Buy disposable gloves. Additives in potting soil , like plant nutrients, can make a mess of your skin, and sensitivity can build up over time.
Amex clear vinyl gloves work well.
Buy a size up and get some talcum powder so you can easily slide them off and on, a good plan because reusing the gloves will save money.
Folding tables work best and can be relocated with ease.Trolleys to put your shipping packages on are essential.
The Amazon adjustable heavy duty storage shelving unit with wheels is versatile and can act as a trolley to get a bunch of packed boxes from your packing area to your car or USPS or UPS pickup van.
Potting soil and Canadian peat moss will ensure you are eligible to have a certified plant nursery. Your own garden soil is full of the ecosystem for your area :we are talking fungus, insects, nematodes, viruses. You can't ship all that to another part of the USA where temperatures can allow explosive growth of insects, or where nematodes can destroy whole fields of cash crops on which a state's economy can depend.
The FDA has rules about this, and your nursery certification allows an annual inspection by someone who knows what an invasive snail, for example, looks like. We don't. They do.
So start off with the knowledge that you're shipping uncontaminated plants free from not only pests and diseases but also from pesticides and herbicides. Hooray for us. A winning situation.
Shade gardens or green houses are needed for growing inventory and you'll also need space suitable for preparation and packing.Choose your work place carefully. It needs to be suitable for growing /potting plants and also for packing
A laptop or cellphone with a printer link is essential. Redundancy works best. Two laptops and two printers will take the stress out of online sales.
Product design
The most important thing to remember is this:
A plant is not a product. Your online sales will depend on your ingenuity in turning a plain plant into something marketable.
To do this, you need to work on that idea.
First, make your plant important, and also valuable by creating plant information sheets.
For Emeritus Gardens we make what we call
Plant " blurbs". These are a half letter-sized sheet with photo of the plant and instructions for care and occasionally how to propagate. That is, you're making every plant into a product using for each plant a short blurb on what to do with it when it arrives and afterwards.Yes, this is needed for each plant.
Don't forget you're selling to customers with wide ranging experience in plant care. Also people with none. Some customers are confident. Others are very intimidated.
Second, packing.
The USPS system has done two things over the past decade. Its service has gone up in price and down on speed of delivery.
Price depends on weight and size.
Don't choose a plant requiring a box over 20" long. Costs really escalate over this 20" length.
Get the most for your money by remembering that the USPS system rounds UP to the next pound weight. So, a 2 lb priority box ships for the same price as a 1 lb 1 oz box.
What does this mean at a practical level?
As your plants grow tall, watch carefully and snip off the height and grow bushy plants.
Grow flexible plants like chamaedorea parlor palms which don't mind being bent into the shape of your boxes and if possible grow plants which are survivors.
Weight control.
Your plants are subjected to wind and rain. They get wet in your garden and water is heavy. You don't want to ship water in the form of wet soil. Nor do you want to send dry rooted plants to customers to die from dehydration en route.
Soil preparation is the key. Re-potting is often needed to make your plant product the correct weight for a profit. Too dry and you'll maybe need to reship your order, so bear this in mind when making up each order. Be smart about soil dampness and learn what works, what doesn't.
Packing plants requires skill.
First, the soil in your pot must be covered to stay in place. I use green florists paper cut into sensible strips. This I wrap around the base of each plant and press down. Then I buy cellophane bags 13" tall with gusset from Nashville Wraps to house each and every 4" potted plant. It works a treat and I tie a raffia bow around the base to keep soil and plant in place. A product is born!
Inside each box, you need to insulate against heat and cold. You also need your plant to retain moisture. I line each box with layers of tissue, then for each plant I find wrapping in multiple layers of tissue ensures success. The air between the layers is an insulating method which works. It allows you to get your plant nicely packed into each box without the chance that it will move in transit. Travel by road or plane means your plants will be vibrated for hours.
You need those plants to stay in place and soft white tissue is ideal. Bunch the tissue up so each plant is firmly held inside the box. Problem solved.
It looks good too. White tissue and raffia are the keywords here. Cellophane bags are also needed for plant wrapping.Remember, you're making a plant into a product!
Nashville Wraps is a good choice for East Coast sellers, Papermart is best for Western sellers because of the shipping costs.
Having Geared up, decide what to sell.
Choosing plants.
There are two things to consider.
Making your own plants is ideal. Costs are minimal but the big nurseries produce exceptionally high quality plants using herbicides and pesticides and plant science experts. It's a big industry to compete against, so choose wisely.
My list for easy to grow successful plants for home growers.
Pothos
Philodendron
Congo philodendron
Red Emerald philodendron
Jade plants.
Plumerias
Nopal and other cactus plants.
Truncalis.
Palm trees
ZZ plants
Cardboard plants
Elephant Ear plants
Trees like Indian beech, mahogany.
Cuttings of hardy plants (see below for list of non-hardy plants)
Seeds.
Shipping failures from my experience will rule out:
Wandering Jew plant
Papayas and any small seedlings.
Purple setcreasea.
Growing Plants
Diversify is the keywords here. Don't put your eggs in one basket. Grow several kinds of
plants.
Also the best plan is also to grown your plants in different areas of your garden. If one place develops issues, like white fly, you will have other plants to sell.
Your strategy is this: you hope to gain advantage over the big sellers by having no herbicides and pesticides
(A big selling point), and by keeping your overhead costs low so you can compete pricewise.
That way your plants won't be soaked in chemicals to keep pests at bay and your fulfillment expenses are low so you can compete price-wise with the big guys.
Growing season length varies. Global warming is on your side with longer growing time and shorter dormant periods. Remember day length is also a growing trigger. Grow lights and heating pads add costs.Also water.
Rain water is best for plants and will substantially lower production expenses. So, invest when profits allow in rain barrels and online pumps. My lidded plastic garbage bins came from Lowe's and the pump came from Amazon. Total cost around $70 ,saving a lot of money over time and providing the best water your plants could hope for.
Grow in demand plants.
Like clothing and interior decor, plant fads come and go- just like in the plant fashion world. Look for plants that people want and grow those.
Research into plant fashion is quite easy. Amazon makes lists of fast-selling stuff in the garden department. But the best way is to scroll through plants online and look at star feedback ratings on the product pages. If a plant has thousands of feedbacks, you can bet it's a good seller. Grow that one. Yes, you can argue those feedbacks can come from a high advertising budget, or an aggressive post-sales follow up, or an enclosure in every order begging for a response. But bottom line, those scores are a good measure of sales and sales are a good measure of how fashionable that plant is at the moment.
The "at the moment" issue is a bit of a problem in the online plant market. It takes time to grow a plant and during that time the demand and price can go down. Way down. It's a risk, so always diversify if you depend on the income from your plant sales.
Plant grooming
When you sell a plant, you need to match as closely as you can the picture you provide on the product page. But every plant is unique, differing from all other plants growing in the same conditions for the same length of time. Plants on the edge of a tray of growing plants have extra light, dry out faster and so have a constellation of things which make it larger or smaller or greener than those at the center of the tray.
This is where you and your opinion will come into every sale. Does it match the product page image? If larger, can you list it separately and sell for more? Is it ready to ship or if too wet, does it need to be re-potted ?
These are just examples of the many many questions surrounding the choice of readiness before shipping. An important final point. The number of leaves on a plant isn't something that's important. If a leaf is yellowing, trim it off. The overall plant will look way better without it.
Minimizing losses
It's obvious, but I'll say it. Plants are perishable. Yes, there are varieties that are clearly robust survivors. Cactus plants and succulents come to mind. It's hard to kill a parlor palm and,given fair treatment, a pothos plant behaves more like a want-to-live weed than a houseplant.
But most houseplants when shipped are vulnerable. USPS priority mail proudly proclaims tracked and insured, but the fine print excludes plants. Sorry.
So, there is the shipping. A dangerous time for a plant. Then there is the arrival and new life in a new home with a new plant parent.
Homes vary a lot and none match the environment of my shade gardens. My gardens allow only 80% of Florida's bright sunlight in, and the humidity is around 90%.
A winter home up north can be as low as 68 F and have the humidity of a desert.
Then we have your new plant parent.Let me first explain the parent analogy.
Plant parents as mentioned before come in shapes and sizes of knowledge and understanding. You're throwing each plant into the unknown. So your blurbs need to state the obvious. Put your new plant near some daylight. Water it if dry. Contact you if there are questions.And above all beg your new plant parent not to return it if the new plant is sick or dies. Always include in the box: "don't return a dead plant" . Why? Because you pay to ship the dead plant back. Ask for a picture, by all means, but always beg for zero returns.
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