Deciding to deliver

Garden centers in 1995 were skeptical of the utility offered by the fledgling Internet, according to articles from Garden Center’s first year. We’ve clearly discovered that the Web is not going anywhere. Most retailers have embraced the Internet as a tool to share information, connect with customers and promote their brands. Many are also seeing the potential of offering their products through online ordering and making home delivery available to customers.

But what makes an effective web store and delivery operation?

Although delivery radius, product variety and many other factors vary among garden centers and other green goods retailers, many successful ones tend to have a robust, easy-to-navigate web presence and a delivery plan tailored to their clientele.

During a conversation among green industry representatives at the Uncensored networking event sponsored by parent company GIE Media in Cleveland this past September, several managers and owners expressed concern over rising shipping and fuel costs that impact delivery at their businesses. For Paul Bachman, president of Bachman’s, a six-location floral, gift and garden center chain in the St. Paul, Minn., area, these complications make it difficult to maintain a fleet of in-house delivery vehicles.

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“It’s a huge challenge,” Bachman says. “We have our own motor shop because we probably have [more than 50] vehicles of one kind or another. They’re not all delivering to the consumer, but they’re performing some function for Bachman’s. It usually has a lot to do with distribution and so forth. In terms of delivery vehicles that deliver to consumers, it’s a much smaller number. We’ve just been in [the floral industry] for a long time so it’s just something we’ve grown up with.”

Bachman’s started as a produce company almost 130 years ago and has been known for reliable delivery services for much of its history. Today, Bachman says his business delivers to customers within a roughly 25-mile radius from the main store. To get the job done, Bachman’s uses about 12 delivery vehicles of varying size to make floral and wholesale deliveries.

“Every metro area is different, so we go further in some directions than others,” Bachman says. “We were a florist before we were a garden center operation. Part of being in the floral business is offering delivery.”

To ensure plant quality during delivery, Bachman’s plants are covered in cellophane wrap by workers in a specialized wrapping department. Many of these plants are transported in air-conditioned trucks fitted with compartments that prevent merchandise from tipping over in transit.

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While a florist is generally expected to deliver their products, other green businesses see delivery as more of an optional endeavor. Bachman says delivery can be a valuable addition to a retailer’s services, but the investment needed to establish that service should match the demand for it.

“Each garden center has to assess the level of customer need,” Bachman says. “Are a lot of your customers asking for delivery? Is this something you could risk losing business to a competitor because they offer delivery and you don’t? It’s an individual decision and a lot of it is based on competition and where your store is located.”

The question of green retail delivery is both enhanced and complicated by the Internet, which facilitates easier ordering by customers but also opens up new dimensions of customer service. Greenwood Nursery, based in McMinnvile, Tenn., has been in business since the late 1970s and embraced online commerce early on in 1998, says Co-owner Cheryl Jones.

Jones says about 70 percent of her business is done through the Greenwood Nursery website, with the rest made up of wholesale and other offline sales. The company’s entire inventory is available online. Early adoption of web shopping broadened Greenwood’s customer base from wholesale to retail and presented new challenges.

“That kind of changed things for us,” Jones says. “All the sudden, we had the end user, the home gardener, wanting to buy so we were gearing more toward the home gardener. Rather than selling things in quantity and bulk, we started focusing on selling individual plants.”

Jones says selling to home gardeners usually involves more customer education than wholesale business.

“Of course, we always provided customer service to our wholesale customers, but when you start going into the home gardener in more of a retail (format), you’re providing a lot more customer service there,” Jones added. “As a wholesaler selling to another grower, there’s a 95 percent chance. They’re going to know what to do with the plants and carry them forward. With home gardeners, you have a varied clientele.”

Greenwood Nursery processes an average volume of about 75 orders per day and does so with a dedicated staff member who manages online transactions, but other employees pitch in as needed. Customers have no minimum quantity for online orders, though other web retailers may need to examine the logistics issue of shipping a single plant or product.

The number spikes significantly during holiday seasons, but Bachman’s processes between 200 and 300 orders per day, Bachman says. A dedicated company webmaster oversees the ordering system, but staff members down the line are needed to process and fill individual orders. The vast majority of Bachman’s online inventory is floral goods, while many gift items and other wholesale products are available only in-store.

Deciding to invest in online ordering also calls attention to the issue of sales taxes; if a garden center in one state starts selling to customers in other states, how will differing sales tax rates affect the business?

“Once you’re selling, you have to decide, ‘Will I sell enough online to warrant going through all of that?’ That opens kind of a Pandora’s box,” Bachman says. “A lot of stuff happens, it becomes complicated, things like calculating sales tax. If somebody in another municipality orders, you have to understand what their sales tax is or you have to understand what the sales tax is where it’s being delivered. It gets extremely complicated. So, there’s a heavy investment to set up a commerce [web]site.”

While Bachman’s utilizes an in-house fleet of vehicles to make regional and local deliveries, Greenwood ships throughout the continental U.S. and Alaska through a contract with FedEx and priority mail. Inventory volume and customer need both factor into determining a delivery plan and shipping radius. Not every business has the kind of catalogue that sells across the country, and not every business has the local following necessary to sustain an in-house delivery program.

“We just have had enough volume so that we’ve been able to sustain our own delivery system, but we’re kind of unique in that way,” Bachman says.

Whether retailers are interested in a fully-fledged delivery service, in-store pickup or simply a display catalogue, the online experience should be user friendly above all else, Jones says.

“Of course, for the customer to be able to hit the homepage or hit the particular landing page they have and maneuver around easily and effectively to find what they’re looking for [is important],” Jones says. “It’s just a matter of having an effective website. I would suggest hiring a good design firm to do that and put it together, but you definitely want to get recommendations from a lot of people on who they have used.”

Although the degrees to which retailers pursue online ordering and delivery differ greatly, many agree that it’s important to channel new technologies. Delivery isn’t a requirement, but not keeping up a modern online presentation can hurt customer engagement.

“As people order online, the experience keeps getting better and better, so you need a sophisticated commerce site in order to have people look at your stuff and view it favorably,” Bachman says. “[Consumers] are used to some pretty tricky stuff when they go online to buy, so you run the risk of looking very antiquated or slow if you don’t maintain.”