During the covid crisis, lots of new gardeners turned to the online sellers, however judging by the number of complaints it was not always successful.
I would start by saying, we don’t sell online but have done in the past so we have some understanding of what happened.
In a normal year, the online sellers place orders for plants and products in advance guessing how many they could sell. This is done months before they can start selling them. With a bit of luck, customers will order early and they can match the sales to the orders.
So for instance on the nursery, we agree with the garden centre what they want for next summer and place our young plant orders in the autumn to make sure the stock is available. By January our suppliers have sold out for the peak season and even if you beg there is no more stock.
Guessing and Greed
The online sellers will have to do the same, if they don’t order the stock they won’t get it. They have to hope customer sales match the orders.
Quite often about half way through their season, they can adjust their stock levels, increasing or reducing orders (upsetting the suppliers) to match sales. This means in theory the stock on the website is accurate, they are selling stock that they have ordered even if it has not arrived yet.
Sometimes sellers put more stock on the site knowing they could increase the orders for stock due late May or June, with the suppliers, if it looks like they could sell out.
In a normal year, it works fairly well, you have time to adjust the stock available and most customers will get what they want. But during lockdown orders poured in faster than anybody expected, this caught out most sellers. The problem with the internet is that it never closes if the seller didn’t keep on top of the stock levels it was very easy to oversell, normally they could ring round and purchase some more or similar stock but now everybody was chasing the same stock. It takes 6-8 weeks to produce bedding plugs, for cuttings it could be 10 weeks and for shrubs it is 2-3 years
Could you make it worse
With newspaper and magazine offers the problems are potentially bigger, think of it like sending out party invitations on Facebook, people message to say they are coming, you expect a few more to turn up. Your party starts as normal, everybody is happy by suddenly lots of people turn up, the house starts to fill up, the food and drink start to run out, but more people pile in, soon it is standing room only.
Its a bit tight, but you think it can’t get any worse, however when you look outside there is a massive queue down the street. Okay you think, it’s bad, but it will stop soon, unfortunately, people are still posting invitations to each other, you forgot to put a finishing time on your invite. The same happens with newspaper and magazine adverts and offers, they are placed and paid for in advance the seller has no idea how many sales each advert will bring in.
If the sellers had just sold the stock they had ordered, most of the problems could have been avoided, but with rising sales most sensed an opportunity and tried to order extra stock or buy up stock that was destined for garden centres. Sellers who normally only sell the stock they grow themselves have not had these problems. The big sellers tend to buy stock from specialist growers this adds another link in the supply chain and can cause problems.
If you bought online and had terrible plants or service, the reasons above won’t be much help but they can explain some of the bad reviews you will come across. look at recent reviews and you should find things have returned to normal.
Well what about ordering this year ? I think most suppliers have learn from 2020, they will have increased their orders and perhaps learned not to be so greedy
If you can look at sellers who grow and sell their own stock, they have more control of their stock. You should also look at smaller sellers they will have managed their stock and customers more carefully.
