Meet Ship My Plants

E-commerce can be a burden for many independent garden centers. The options have traditionally been to go through the time and expense of developing a sales platform on a business website or turning to outlets like Amazon.

But Rich Christakes, the CEO of two Chicago-area garden centers, is seeking to change that with a new online, multi-vendor, plant-focused marketplace.

Ship My Plants, which officially launched in July, enables green industry sellers to enter the e-commerce world by allowing businesses to set up seller profiles and list a variety of products, from plants, seeds and bulbs to garden tools and accessories.

Christakes explains the marketplace is a platform specifically for the consumer horticulture industry with lower commission fees than big-box marketplaces. It’s also meant to help connect plant businesses with the 18 million new gardeners in the U.S. in 2020. 

“We thought it’d be really cool if there was a multi-vendor marketplace platform that was geared towards the plant industry, towards consumer horticulture, created by people in consumer horticulture,” says Christakes, the founder of Ship My Plants and CEO of grower-retailer Alsip Home & Nursery. (Ship My Plants, which has six employees, shares some employees with Alsip but is a separate entity.)

The power of the marketplace

Christakes, who has experience with small businesses digital advertising and web development and design, previously sold plants on Amazon and his own business’ website. He notes that traditional marketplaces, like Amazon, don’t necessarily cater to the selling needs of the plant industry.

“Being an Amazon seller, we kind of realized the power of the marketplace, but also how Amazon kind of treated all the sellers the same way and didn’t really have a good understanding for plant sellers, or at least the challenges that a plant seller selling a plant online [faces]: putting it in a box, making sure that it arrives safe and healthy and not damaged,” Christakes says.

Ship My Plants takes a curated approach to its marketplace, focusing on quality over quantity. The site, which also prioritizes organic and natural products, requires sellers to complete their due diligence before offering plants that may be invasive in particular areas. 

“We’re taking a different lens on online selling...and it is not through the lens of the endless aisle,” says Ship My Plants director of business development Clint Albin. “It is actually through the lens of product popularity and what people are looking for at that time.” 

The site utilizes geolocation via ZIP code to help buyers connect with local sellers, and sellers can also set their shipping parameters. That focus on connecting local buyers and sellers also helps cut down on carbon emissions.

The NetPS Plant Finder Tool, a commercial plant database with nearly 40,000 plants, is embedded in the Ship My Plants site, allowing sellers to use the database’s information to create product descriptions and add high-quality plant photos to their online profile listings. Other features include videos of products that shoppers can browse and the Leaflets blog.

Each seller also has their own unique dashboard with sales and reporting data and history. 

Sellers have four shipping options: put products in a box and ship locally, put products in a box and ship nationwide, do their own deliveries locally or have online pickup in their stores. Using the Avalara software system, Ship My Plants calculates the sales tax for the seller from the point of origin to the point of destination based on the product category to which it belongs (consistent with sites like Etsy and Amazon).

It’s all meant to reduce the e-commerce burden for sellers.

Ship My Plants’ current sellers include Alsip Home & Nursery, Green Promise Farms, We The Wild, Proven Winners, Blooms Greenhouse Grower Outlet, Natorp’s Nursery Outlet, Plant By Number, Mossify, Sunlet Nursery and Bargain Garden.

We The Wild is an Australia-based company that launched in the U.S. in 2022. Its 100% organic plant care products are made by earthworms. 

“We started with Ship My Plants from the very beginning,” We The Wild founder Josh Armstrong says. “It is a perfect complement to our current in-store efforts, running in the background without much effort on my part. Ship My Plants handles the transactions, sales tax and advertising.”

How selling works

Those interested in signing up to be a seller can visit shipmyplants.com and click “Sell Your Plants.” Businesses can create their own online profile and store and connect their ShipStation account for easy label processing.

Payment processing is done through Stripe Express (with a gateway fee of 2.9% plus 30 cents for the total transaction, meaning the product subtotal and applicable taxes and shipping). 

Ship My Plants also charges a 10% commission fee on the final sale price of each item sold. The fee only applies to products, not applicable taxes or shipping. 

There are multiple membership levels that allow sellers to list specified numbers of products. The memberships are billed either annually or quarterly.

“It’s a great way to dip your toe into e-commerce if you’re not wanting to go full blast,” Christakes explains. “Our smallest package, it’s $1 a year for five listings.”

Albin said businesses can go from setup to selling in 24 hours. He notes that sellers can also move products to a “draft” mode to reflect their current inventory or seasonal offerings, then repost them the following season or when items are back in stock (and draft items don’t factor into the product listing count for memberships).

“Where this really becomes successful and a huge time saver for retail garden centers is that they’re able to just bring back that core group of products at that same date in the future,” Albin says. “In looking at transitioning from a spring shrub mix to a fall shrub mix, it’s as easy as a couple of clicks.”

According to Forbes, 20.8% of all retail purchases will be made online in 2023, jumping to 24% by 2026. 

“This is an omnichannel world that we’re living in,” Christakes says. “This isn’t instead of or in place of. It’s in addition to. Restaurants, they’re on DoorDash, they’re on Uber Eats. Garden centers are going to start viewing Ship My Plants in the same manner.” 

Albin adds that Ship My Plants allows green industry businesses to pursue revenue diversification. 

“It’s to be able to have a revenue source 365 days a year,” Albin says. “We think that retail garden centers not only need to have robust e-commerce websites on their own website that is actually providing convenience to their regular loyal customers, but they need to be utilizing a platform like Ship My Plants to get in front of new customers to be able to attract them.”

Emily Mills is associate editor of Garden Center magazine. Contact her at emills@gie.net.