In my day job I co-run a small retail plant nursery specialising in bedding and patio plants. Recently we where looking for ways to earn extra revenue and the idea of selling on the internet came up.
We looked at ebay and did some experiments with a few items, since this is the easiest way to get a store set up, and soon sorted out some good ways to pack and ship plants and hopefully gained a few ideas about what the market wanted.
I did some more research in google and, whilst there are a number of merchants selling bedding plants, sometimes at very low prices, they concentrate on a small number of popular varieties. If you’re happy with mixed colours of geraniums, impatiens and petunias they do a good job of filling the market, but don’t fulfill the market for customers who wants to choose their own colours, or less common varieties.
The other setback with these companies is that you place your order and receive delivery at some unspecified time in the future. They don’t offer same week or same day dispatch. And you can’t plan your garden over winter and have the plants delivered the week you want them in spring (or whatever other season).
So, the plan is to be experts with a wide range of stock and to allow same week dispatch or dispatch on a specified delivery week.
Well, I did find one supplier who offers what we plan to offer, and fortunately they’re not offering cut throat pricing. So, they’ve proved there’s a market to be tapped and it’s also a market which isn’t being flogged to death with cheap prices. Good.
So, in recent months I’ve spent my spare hours at work creating an online plant ordering system in Rails. You may ask why I didn’t use an off the shelf shopping cart system. Well, obviously creating one in Rails is far more fun than a pre-packaged system, but I also felt that a custom solution would allow us much more flexibility. For example, with allowing the customer to select a delivery week.
A custom solution also allows me great flexibility in playing with the database, collecting information about both pre and post sales data, running A/B tests and arranging and rearranging products in any way I like to see which produces the most sales.
I’ve been reading a number of books about online marketing lately and have a head full of ideas for experiments to run, which I intend to be writing about on this blog in due course.
Fun times should be ahead. The site is now online. If you want to take a look, visit beddingandbasket.co.uk