Every retailer is hearing the same message: “You need ecommerce! Add checkout. Offer buy online pickup in store (“BOPIS”), local delivery, ship local, maybe even ship out of region. Capture incremental sales. Don’t get left behind…”. The pressure is constant, and it’s coming from everywhere, especially software providers. Shopify, Epicor, and traditional POS vendors like LightSpeed, CounterPoint, and Square are all pushing ecommerce hard into the garden center channel because, for them, it’s a logical upsell and a “greenfield” opportunity. “Just turn on the feature – It’s easy”. But what’s easy for a software company to sell isn’t necessarily profitable for a business to operate. The moment you move beyond in-store merchandising and start promising to transact online, you’re not just running a garden center anymore – you’re becoming a warehouse, a tech company, and a logistics operator all at once. And that’s a VERY different business.
Plants Wither in the Ecommerce Machine
Ecommerce works well for identical, durable products that sit quietly on shelves. Plants are none of those things. They’re living, variable, perishable, and subjective. Two of the same SKU rarely look the same. Customers don’t want “a hydrangea” – they want the one that speaks to them. In store, they choose it themselves. Online, you choose for them, which raises expectations and increases dissatisfaction, substitutions, and refunds. You’re forcing a product that changes daily into a system designed for standardized boxes.
Ecommerce Is an Inventory Promise
Here’s the part that really determines success or failure. Ecommerce isn’t just about shiny websites – it’s about promises. The second a customer clicks “Buy”, schedules a pickup, or books a delivery, you are guaranteeing that item exists and will be there when they show up. If it’s not, nothing else matters. In store, an out-of-stock situation is a small inconvenience. Online, it feels like a broken promise. The shopper already paid and planned their day around you. Ecommerce has zero tolerance for “close enough.” Inventory has to be right, every time or the trust is gone.
The Spring Reality: Accuracy Is Nearly Impossible
Now drop that requirement into an IGC in April or May. Trucks arriving daily. Thousands of fresh plants. Constant merchandising. Breakage. Shrink. Weather damage. Customers moving flats. Entire tables selling out before lunch. Counts changing by the hour. Even when the numbers look right, half the crop may not be sellable quality. This isn’t poor management. It’s the nature of live goods. IGCs are dynamic, hands-on environments, not controlled warehouses. Expecting near perfect inventory precision during peak season is unrealistic. And without near perfect inventory, ecommerce doesn’t create convenience. It creates cancellations, refunds, frustration and disappointed customers. No accurate inventory, no reliable ecommerce. It’s that simple.
Delivery and Shipping Turn You Into a Logistics Company
Whether it’s local delivery or shipping out of region, the moment you promise to bring plants to the customer, you’ve entered the logistics business. Many IGCs already deliver, but shipping is a different beast. And ecommerce is won and lost on freight economics. Plants are bulky, heavy with soil and water, fragile, and temperature sensitive. Carriers charge for dimensional weight, so moving a $20 plant can cost as much or more in shipping costs. Customers don’t want to pay more for delivery than the product itself, so you either lose the sale or quietly subsidize it and erode margin. Add the reality of damage, stress, and replacements, which are inevitable, plus packaging, labor, and staging space, and you’re essentially paying to transport dirt and hoping something is left over. There’s a reason you don’t see Amazon aggressively selling live plants nationwide. If anyone has mastered fulfillment, it’s them. And even they’ve approached the category cautiously. Any plants you see for sale on Amazon are most likely offered and fulfilled by independent sellers. Shipping fragile, perishable, low margin goods simply doesn’t behave like traditional ecommerce. The physics don’t cooperate and the math rarely works.
Fulfillment Eats Time and Space
Even buy online pickup in-store (“BOPIS”) sounds simple until you try it at scale. Plants must be located, inspected, watered, staged, and protected. Inventory gets reserved and pulled off the floor and can’t be sold to store shoppers. Staff spend time managing substitutions and exceptions. Every small order consumes labor and space while removing product that could have been part of a larger in-store basket. What looks frictionless on a website often becomes slow, manual work behind the scenes. You’ve layered a warehouse workflow onto a retail store without warehouse margins to support it.
The Hidden Staffing and Admin Lift
Then comes the expertise most IGCs simply don’t have. Running ecommerce means managing integrations, fixing inventory syncs, maintaining product data, processing refunds, answering online questions, and troubleshooting whatever breaks this week. Someone has to own that every day. The product catalog alone is a heavy lift. Plants require real information such as zones, light, size, and care details, and with thousands of seasonal SKUs constantly rotating, listings must be created and retired nonstop. Thin or incomplete pages don’t convert. They erode trust. This isn’t a side task. It’s a job. Often a full time one. And that payroll hits long before ecommerce shows a return.
Price Transparency Changes the Rules
Selling online also strips away many of the advantages IGCs rely on. In store, you compete on assortment, discovery, and expertise. Online, you sit side by side with big box chains and national growers in a grid of prices. The comparison becomes instant and brutal. Suddenly you’re judged on price and shipping speed instead of value and the shopping experience. The business becomes commoditized. Competing with national retailers on logistics is a race few IGCs can win.
Traffic Isn’t Free. You Pay for Every Click.
Then there’s the cost most retailers forget to model. Traffic. A checkout button doesn’t magically create demand. You have to buy it through SEO, paid search, social ads, email, and ongoing digital marketing. Every click costs money. Every order carries customer acquisition cost (“CAC”) and managing return on ad spend (“ROAS”) is an added level of complex accounting. Meanwhile, many of those customers were already planning to visit your store anyway. So you end up paying to acquire revenue you used to get organically. Add marketing expense, fulfillment labor, and delivery or shipping subsidies, and the same sale that once carried healthy in store margins suddenly looks thin or unprofitable. Ecommerce doesn’t just add revenue. It can cannibalize your own business while lowering total gross margin and profit.
What Shoppers Actually Need
After all that complexity, most garden center shoppers aren’t clamoring to complete the entire transaction online. They’re asking something much simpler – do you have what I want in-stock today? They want confidence before they make the trip. They want to browse, plan, and select the right plants for their project. For most IGCs, the biggest digital win isn’t becoming a miniature Amazon. It’s delivering accurate, trustworthy inventory visibility and clear information that helps people make decisions and walk through the door. In this business, keeping the promise “Yes, it’s here” matters far more than “Add to Cart.”
My Final Thoughts – For Now…
I’m NOT anti-ecommerce. In fact, I’ve spent more than 20 years designing, building, integrating, and supporting ecommerce, mobile and web-app systems of all sizes, from enterprise platforms to small business storefronts including Amazon integration – which is why I have such a strong perspective on the topic. I’ve seen it work incredibly well when the product, margins, and operations line up. Early on, when we were building PlantTAGG, we were sure ecommerce would be part of the solution. We tried hard to find a compelling use case because we know exactly how to do it technically. We even explored models similar to “FTD Florist”, a shared catalog with local IGCs handling the last mile. On paper, it made perfect sense.
But the deeper we got into the day-to-day reality of how IGCs actually operate, the clearer it became. For most IGCs, ecommerce isn’t an opportunity. It’s “wildcatting” producing mostly dry holes (I live in Texas…).
Not because IGCs lack ambition, vision, resources or technology, but because the business model doesn’t make sense. Live goods. Constantly changing inventory. Thin margins. Seasonal chaos. Labor heavy fulfillment. Expensive delivery. Paid traffic. Technical complexities. The math and mechanics just don’t work (for most…).
Could/will some IGCs make it work? Absolutely. With the right scale, staff, and systems, anything is possible. But for the majority, flipping on ecommerce isn’t the shiny opportunity vendors promise. It’s complexity layered on top of an already complex business.
What does work is simpler – show shoppers what you actually have. Keep inventory accurate (as good as you can). Help them plan and discover. Give them the reason to come in and the confidence to buy. They will likely fall in love with what you have and purchase way more than they came for, and then return soon to shop again.