Real time shopping

So, first of all, hello and welcome to the first of what will hopefully be a series of articles about our antics across the water.

As this is the first of my articles, I thought it might be fun to kick off with a quiz as a bit of an icebreaker so, here goes….

1. Who established the very first licensed whiskey distillery in the world?
2. Who first artificially split the atom?
3. Who set up the very first real time online stock level catalogue for purchasers of nursery stock?

And, the answer to all three is … yep, the Irish!

Now, much as I would love to rattle on incessantly about the virtues of distilling whiskey in the western world or the work of Earnest Walton from Co. Waterford, who was the first to successfully convert matter into energy thus vindicating our old mate Albert and his E=MC² ramblings, I figured it is probably more appropriate to stick to Tully’s Nurseries and its innovative approach to keeping its valued customers abreast of the availability of their plant material.

Tully’s has recently installed a Microsoft Retail Management POS system onsite and subsequently created a website powered by Nitrosell, which specializes in webshops for Microsoft Retail Management. The programme synchronises the website twice every hour with their POS system during which time it brings in online orders and imports them directly into the POS system under the customer accounts. The webshop also updates customer details when they are changed, collates the delivery addresses and any other information and saves it all under the customer details in the POS system.

When trade customers view stock online, they are able to see real time availability plus their discounted trade price if they are logged into the system, or the full retail price if not. This also gives them a calculation of their price in relation to the full retail price, thus enabling easy calculations of gross margin, which is an additional useful feature. It also ensures that the stock they have ordered will definitely be delivered, thus helping to avoid out of stock situations and customer disappointment.

The same system has also been adopted by a number of garden centres including Whitehall, a chain of three long established and successful garden centres on the southwest of England. In recent years they have found that checkout lines were not moving as crisply as they might and tracking thousands of inventory lines required long hours of input. Good memories and intuition were no longer adequate in their ever-changing world.

Adam Simkins of Whitehall Garden Centres says, “We experimentally and successfully opened up a new marketplace without adding staff. It was so well designed that it saved us from hiring a web designer or IT people.”

All this points to the looming scenario of our industry facing the inevitable consequences of the unrelenting advances in technology and the need to both keep pace and adapt in order to survive. Shopping habits will undoubtedly change along with these advances.

Shopping will no longer be merely a means to an end in terms of acquiring goods but must be an experience in its own right in order to be sustainable. As suppliers of plants and related goods to the gardening public we must necessarily explore whatever avenues are open to us both online and in-store.

Kevin has worked as an independent garden center consultant to retailers, suppliers, DIY stores and trade organizations across the UK, Ireland, Europe, U.S. and Japan since 1995 and founded The Garden Works in 2001. He specializes in shop-floor activities, team motivation and development, product knowledge, display and merchandising and promotional activities. He also works as gardening writer, broadcaster and presenter with the garden press, radio and television networks within the UK and Ireland. Kevin can be reached at kevinwatersconsultancy@gmail.com.