Article – How to launch an e-commerce site

Weave a Profitable Web
By Ashley Puderbaugh
Published November 2009
Lawn & Garden Retailer magazine

“If you build it, they will come”? The process of building an e-commerce site is only the beginning for a garden center retailer.

Setting up an e-commerce site might seem daunting at first, but there are many ways to go about it, depending on your needs and experience level.

The Internet is gaining momentum as a leading distribution channel, and brand presence in the virtual space is becoming more important for your business’ success. Not only are you able to share valuable information such as special discounts and events with your customers, thus driving traffic to your store, but e-commerce can also increase your potential of reaching a larger customer base.

Online retailing in general continues to be a significant merchandising channel, with online retailers growing in sales, average ticket, conversion rates and more. In fact, projected total online sales of goods and services in 2010 will reach $268 billion, a 14 percent increase from 2009, according to a survey by Forrester Research. While garden center product sales obviously make up a small percentage of those total projected sales, these data show that there is still an opportunity to widen your reach and grow your business.

Having a website with just your location, directions, phone number and minimal information about your products will not necessarily translate into a practical revenue maker. Studies show that consumers like to research product features and price points before making a purchase. According to the Consumer Behavior Report from comparison-shopping company PriceGrabber and market research firm Market Reporter, 91 percent of online consumers said they felt reassured that they were getting the best deal after comparing prices online. This means that if you want to capture the interest of consumers and retain them as loyal customers, then you need to make sure customers see your website as the best source for helpful, fresh information, which includes offering prices for all your products online.

“The majority of consumers are now very comfortable with e-commerce,” says Graeme Grant, COO at Allurent, an online shopping experience provider. “The question retailers now must ask themselves is, ‘What are we doing to meet the higher expectations of these sophisticated shoppers?’”

Choose the Right Merchandise

The first thing to consider is what products you’ll offer in your online store. Garden centers face a unique situation in that a large part of many stores’ sales come from live plants. As a result, many businesses choose to sell only gift cards and other small products.

David Williams, title partner at Williams Nursery in Westfield, N.J. says he started out selling flower bulbs online, “but the problem with flower bulbs was that they were low-cost and high-weight items. “Most of the products we sell — the green goods — they do not lend themselves to the e-commerce very easily. They’re perishable, don’t stack well and we weren’t getting a high enough turn where it was worthwhile.” Now, Williams Nursery sells only collectible Christmas ornaments and gift cards online; Williams says the nursery’s profit from online sales isn’t too exciting.

Barry Christian, retail manager of Berns Garden Center in Middletown, Ohio, says his company partnered with Arett Sales to create an e-commerce site. A thousand items are available through Berns’ online store, but the products are actually being shipped to customers from Arett.

The e-commerce site went live earlier this year, Christian says, but it hasn’t been as successful as he was hoping. “Maybe it’s a different product line we need,” he says. “I’m still learning.”

Nature Hills, however, is an online-only nursery based out of Omaha that’s been crafting its online strategy for years, says president Jeff Dinslage. When the store went live, they had only two sales that day. “But we felt that there was a need for an online merchant that sold larger materials than the traditional mail-order companies. After the Internet bubble burst and companies like garden.com failed, there wasn’t much online competition for live trees and plants.”

Dinslage says the company’s shipping practices continue to improve each year, and each generation of packaging is better than the last. One consideration when shipping live goods is making sure the media’s moisture is just right. “Not too wet,” Dinslage warns, “but the challenge is that the plant can’t dry out during the different transit times to various parts of the country.” Other potential problems include package damage from the carrier or a missed staple from a packager. Product selection is challenging as well, he says, as different plants react differently to being boxed and shipped across the country. Many company- and state-enforced rules help prevent damaging items during transit, too, such as state agricultural restrictions and oversize and weight rules.

Nature Hills is confident in their packaging and UPS’s shipping practices: The company doesn’t have a return policy for live plants. “We are vigilant to send out the best product available, so we have very few complaints versus the volume of packages that are sent every year,” he explains. Nonetheless, if a plant does arrive damaged or in poor condition, Nature Hills ships a new plant immediately.

Set Up Shop

Nature Hills uses a customized version of dashCommerce, an open-source e-commerce platform. Dinslage says the company initially used a local contractor to help customize the application but now contracts with an offshore ASP.net consultancy called UruIT, which helps maintain the platform and makes ongoing enhancements.

However, there are many types of e-commerce solutions you can use for your website, from hands-off, shopping cart–only companies that allow you to build your own site to full-service partners that take care of everything, from ordering to shipping.

If you’re a small garden center and are planning to sell only a few products online, you can most likely add a shopping cart to the site yourself, especially with the variety of out-of-the-box solutions available. Shopping-cart software allows you to take orders, calculate shipping and sales tax and send order notifications. These usually cost about $30 to $80 per month, and some popular options include ShopSite Inc., GoEcart.com, Agoracart and Americart.

Next, you’ll want to set up an Internet merchant account from your bank, which will allow you to accept credit card payments online. If your bank turns you down or you’d prefer to go with a separate institution for online payments, do an online search for “credit card processing” to find companies offering accounts to budding online businesses.

You’ll also need a payment gateway account. This online processer will hook into both your customers’ credit card accounts and your Internet merchant account to verify information, transfer requests and authorize credit cards in real time. Christian at Berns Garden Center uses authorize.net for this, but you can also try VeriSign or Fast Charge Payment Gateway.

One downside of setting up your own shopping cart program, however, is that your inventory in the store and online may not match. Williams Nursery had that problem: “I didn’t have the same inventory numbers in the store and the website, and it wasn’t updated in the online store, so we disappointed customers by not having products in stock.” Williams remedied this problem by switching to the online version of his POS software, CPOnline by Radiant Systems. “It is quite a bit easier to integrate with our actual store inventory,” he says. “Now we can seamlessly download our orders directly into CounterPoint with minimal keystrokes.”

Try Fully Integrated Solutions

If you’d rather not build your site yourself, there are many hosted web or e-commerce companies that can help. Web-hosting companies commonly offer a combination of site-building tools; product catalog tools; shopping-cart technology, payment, shipping and marketing strategies; tracking and reporting capabilities; domain registration; and hosting.

One such store is eBay’s ProStores, which is available to everyone, not just eBay sellers. You can create a professional store, customized with your own branding and domain name, and you won’t have eBay branding anywhere on your site. It also has built-in marketing tools that will help you promote your new online store.

Nexternal Solutions also offers fully integrated program, says president Alex Gile. “We host and manage all the technology, which alleviates ‘the technology headache’”: issues including security, backups and redundancies. Nexternal Solutions acts as an extension of your website, and some of its clients include USA Today and San Francisco’s high-end Boudin Bakery. Nexternal also offers tools that help streamline options such as shipping-label generation, marketing tools such as data feeds, comparison-shopping engines and other channels that can generate traffic.

Take the Next Steps

And that is key for any e-commerce site: You must have a marketing plan set up for your online store. How else will people know it’s there? “A lot of people have the attitude of, ‘If you build it, they will come,’ but you need to really have a plan so that people do visit and purchase,” says Nexternal’s Gile. He recommends a combination of online marketing and offline advertising. You can also optimize your site to rank well organically in search engines, Gile says, which can be a good source of free advertising.

In-store fliers and signage, adding the URL to your print advertising or linking to the site in e-newsletters are great ways of letting customers know about your site. Williams also buys Google Adwords and pays for click advertising on Yahoo!.

Or consider setting up a kiosk in the store like Bern’s Garden Center did. The brick-and-mortar store doesn’t carry everything available, so if a customer asks for something that’s exclusive to the online store, employees are trained to guide them over to the kiosk to check. That way, it’s really just an extension of the physical store.

The main thing to remember, Christian says, is not to expect too much from your e-commerce site in the beginning. “It’s a building thing, just like anything else,” he says. “I think we have a great foundation and think it will be successful, but we have to continue to work on it.”