David Williams of Williams Nursery in Westfi eld,
N.J., started out selling fl ower bulbs online but
had to reevaluate to be more cost effective:
Now he sells only Christmas ornaments and gift
cards online.
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 soft-
ware allows you to take orders,
calculate shipping and sales
tax and send order notifi cations.
These usually cost about $30 to
$80 per month, and some pop-
ular 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 fi nd companies offering accounts
to budding online businesses.
You’ll also need a payment
gateway account. This online pro-
cesser will hook into both your cus-
tomers’ 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, how-
ever, is that your inventory in the
store and online may not match. Wil-
liams Nursery had that problem: “I
didn’t have the same inventory num-
bers 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 soft-
ware, CPOnline by Radian Systems.
“It is quite a bit easier to integrate
with our actual store inventory,” he
says. “Now we can seamlessly down-
load our orders directly into Coun-
terPoint 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
Write in 778
26 Lawn & Garden Retailer November 2009
www.lgrmag.com
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