Oct 16, · Starting a plant business is much easier than you think. It requires a lot less of a commitment than you think. Getting started growing and selling small plants from home is as simple as this; Start propagating some plants from cuttings, get some pots and potting soil, start selling some plants. Not a lot, but some plants in your local blogger.comted Reading Time: 7 mins Starting A Mail Order Plant Business. me. It is my first choice when it comes to write my assignments. I will keep using their service. We are the top leading cheap essay writing service. Our rates starts from just $2 per page and quality is always guaranteed. Struggling to write your paper?/10() Starting A Mail Order Plant Business, Resume For Aviation, Example Resume For Student Who Never Worked, How To Write Numbers In Millions Of Dollars/10()
So You Want to Start a Mail Order Perennial Nursery | Article by Plant Delights Nursery
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Many folks looking to break into the nursery business often opt to try mail order. After all, you can appeal to a large audience without having to deal with walk-in retail sales. You can reach customers that will be interested in and willing to pay higher prices for your particular product particularly if there is not enough interest in your local area.
The downside is the incredible complexity required to run a mail order business. In addition to growing the plants, you will also be faced with a mountain of shipping, scheduling, and record keeping issues.
Just like a retail nursery, a mail order nursery will require you to consider many of the same basic questions. Will you grow or purchase your plants, and will you sell potted or starting a mail order plant business plants? What types of plants will you handle, and in what sizes? Once again, most of these questions should be included in your mission statement, starting a mail order plant business. As the mail order industry has evolved, most small nurseries still grow their own plants.
These firms typically started as small backyard operations, and simply evolved into mail order without a real business plan. Typically, it is the larger mail order nurseries that simply purchase plants and offer them for resale. One disadvantage in this strategy is that without a starting a mail order plant business component to dispose of unsold items, too much money is tied up in left-over inventory that must be dumped at the season's end. While the same is true when plants are grown by the nursery, the cost involved is usually much less.
Typically more southern nurseries lean toward container plants, while those in more northern zones, lean toward offering bare root plants. In more northern climates the higher cost of overwintering plants in containers often prevents the nursery from being able to compete on price with southern nurseries, whose overwintering costs are much less due to milder winter temperatures.
Containerized crops are much easier to fit into an extended shipping schedule, but are conversely often more expensive and difficult to maintain in their containers during the growing season.
In order to ship bare root, plants must be dug in the fall and stored in cool conditions usually in refrigerated coolers. Many deciduous woody plantsas well as a large number of perennialsare handled in this manner. This method of storing plants in coolers is anything but an exact science, and high losses are to be expected on certain crops.
Coolers will be a necessity if you are handling bareroot materials, either in the north or south. You will need to carefully examine your target customer base before jumping into the mail order business.
Typically, nurseries that grow more unusual, or simply specialty plants, fare best in this sort of business. You are able to reach across the country or world to plant collectors, who are often willing to pay a higher price for a specialty plant than can be charged in a more local market. Locally, the same plant might have little more value than a more common run-of-the-mill daylily. For the same reason, it is difficult for a mail order nursery to compete with local retailers.
A local retail nursery or garden center should always be able to offer a larger plant for a similar cost compared to a mail order nursery, starting a mail order plant business. The size which a mail order nursery can ship is limited by the high cost of shipping and the shear difficulty of packaging large plants. It is rarely feasible except on very expensive plants to ship any plant larger than a one-gallon pot. A nursery business in mail order nurseries is the most favored by plant geeks.
These often anti-social types honestly feel that they can avoid customer contact by locating a mail order nursery in an out-of-the-way location and never deal with people. While mail order does allow for more privacy, you certainly will have plenty of visitors if you do a good job of running your business.
Out of pure curiosity, starting a mail order plant business, visitors will inevitably find you, so you will have to make a choice whether to prohibit all visitors, or to schedule these visitors in a way that will still allow you to maintain your privacy. Since you are operating a remote business, and customers cannot just drop by the nursery, the need for prompt response to customers is even more critical than in a typical retail operation. Communication, of course, may be through correspondence such as faxes, starting a mail order plant business, e-mail, phone, and to a lesser degree via postal mail.
Often folks who start a mail order business are poorly prepared for the actual handling of orders. There is simply no excuse for being "blind-sided" by orders, when that is the intent of such a business. Doing a poor job of satisfying customers in your start up years creates a difficult hill to climb, so starting a mail order plant business out well prepared. You have no doubt heard the phrase, "follow the money.
As you will soon realize, this is unfortunately not the case, and without a good paper trail, confusion will reign supreme. The shipping process involved in the sale mail order nursery is far and away the most complicated delivery system in any type of nursery business. For starters, a simple procedural rule, can avoid tragedy. Let's imagine a nursery worker who took a stack of original orders into the nursery to pull plants.
Along comes a thunderstorm and all of the orders are lost or starting a mail order plant business. Does this sound unrealistic? From first hand experience, starting a mail order plant business, let me encourage you to always protect the original order, in case of problems or confusion.
I recommend generating your own separate set of paperwork, from which orders are processed. Original paperwork should never be allowed to stray from the security of your office. In most mail order businesses, starting a mail order plant business customers rarely visit; instead you deliver your product to them, which makes your shipping operation of paramount importance.
There are a number of shipping options for your plants. Be sure to thoroughly investigate each one, and choose the one or ones that best fit your needs. Carrier rules, regulations, and prices change so often that you will need to make a special effort just to keep up with this facet of the business. Also, be aware of the possibilities of labor strikes. Depending on a shipper who has gone on strike will prevent you from delivering your product to your customer.
I will certainly never forget the year that our shipping carrier went on strike during a particularly low cash flow time of year, starting a mail order plant business, when we had a large number of orders to be shipped. Never completely rely on starting a mail order plant business shipper keep your options open. When choosing a shipping service, be aware that a shipper's published rates are not necessarily what you starting a mail order plant business pay providing you take time to negotiate.
You should contact the local or regional representative for each potential shipping service, and request a shipping rate quotation. Be sure to ask questions such as the shipper's ability to track packages that become lost or not delivered on time. What type of delivery options are available overnight, two-day delivery, three-day delivery, or delivery whenever it arrives usually the cheapest?
Many shippers have some hidden surcharges increases over their normal rates. Surcharges such as dimensional weight kick in when a package is too long for a specific set of preset parameters. Despite fitting all of their other criteria for a particular shipment charge, starting a mail order plant business, if the box is slightly too long, starting a mail order plant business, the shipping price can go up as much as threefold, so be very careful of this charge.
The shipping company will ask you for information on how many boxes per week you will ship, along with sizes, etc. Shipping rates are based on volume the more volume, the better the rates. Another factor that comes into play is location.
If you have a very remote location, it will be very expensive for the delivery service to visit your business, so they will be less likely to give you a discount. Conversely, if the shipper is looking to build up business in a particular location or has another business nearby, they may find it cost effective to give you a much larger discount than a customer in an established service area.
There are a number of computer-based shipping systems available for use whose versatility increases with the number of packages you ship. Some systems will give you the package weight, print a shipping label directly from your database, track packages, and even compare the cost of various shipping companies.
Contact the various shippers for information on their systems, but also check out shipping systems in the phone book that are manufactured by independent companies.
If you ship a large enough volume with a particular shipper, they will usually provide a shipping computer and system for you at no charge, or at least a label printer and software. Be sure to ask them to help you integrate their system with your own database, so starting a mail order plant business order information does not have to be re-entered into the new shipping system. Due to agricultural restrictions, a number of states do not allow any soil or potting mix to enter, unless it has been treated with an array of chemicals.
This will certainly make shipping during growing seasons difficult, but not impossible. Many nurseries simply refuse to ship into these states. If you decide that you will still ship into these states, determine the time required to wash the soil from the roots, or treat each plant, and develop a standard charge possibly as a percentage of the order to cover your extra cost of shipping to these states.
Be aware that there is a big difference as to how easy plants are to bare root, and that survivability also varies with each species. Another consideration in the shipping process is to locate boxes in which to ship. When getting started, most small nurseries opt for recycled boxes. Many small nursery owners can recall starting a mail order plant business out dumpsters at the local grocery store or perhaps the recycling center.
While we are confessing, I will admit to having spent far more time than I care to recall in the early years waking up drunks, or being terrorized by wild-eyed cats while prowling through restaurant dumpsters for the perfect shipping box.
I will admit to having had a hard time getting used to the concept of purchasing boxes. I will also admit that I have seen the error of my early ways, no better pointed out starting a mail order plant business a local mail order nursery reused a frozen food box for shipping a plant order. When the customer received the box, they only paid attention to the printing on the box that said to "Freeze Immediately", which they did.
Only after several weeks did it occur to the customer that their plant order might be in the box several weeks too late. At some point, you will determine that this is no longer cost effective, and that you or your employees' time starting a mail order plant business worth more doing other jobs in the nursery than hunting boxes.
Once you make this jump to purchasing boxes, you may still first consider purchasing box overruns. Most box companies offer these "seconds" at a greatly reduced rate compared to new boxes.
When you require large numbers of boxes, it may become economical to purchase new boxes printed with your nursery logo and name.
A Tour Of My Plant Shop \u0026 How I Sell \u0026 Ship My Plants!
, time: 18:36How to Start a Mail Order Nursery | MOTHER EARTH NEWS
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