Meet Ship My Plants, an online, multi-vendor, 'plant-centric' marketplace

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, allows 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 said the marketplace is a platform specifically for the consumer horticulture industry with lower commission fees than big-box marketplaces. It is 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,” said 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.)

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 noted 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 said.

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,” said 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 — the world’s largest 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.  

Those interested in signing up to be a seller can visit shipmyplants.com and click “Sell Your Plants” (or contact Albin at Clint@shipmyplants.com for assistance). 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 said. “Our smallest package, it's $1 a year for five listings.” 

Albin said businesses can go from setup to selling in 24 hours. He noted 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 drafted items don’t factor into the product listing count for memberships).

Albin added 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 said. “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."