Hey, it's Jason again here at Fraser Valley Rose Farm. Well, I'm trying something new in my business
I thought it might take you along for the ride
I'll explain first that the way I've done business up to this point:
we're a little backyard nursery out of Mission BC
and
what I've done is I take cuttings of roses and
Other plants sometimes also by seed and when I've raised them to sellable size I bring them to local selling events
normally
I'm considering the option of selling them online and shipping them across the country here in Canada
So I'm going to go through quickly
some of the
Considerations that I've made making that decision and some of the challenges I'm facing
Along the way so that you can decide whether this is something that's right for you
So maybe I'll start with the fact that shipping rates in Canada are very unfavorable
If you were to be shipping plants in the United States or shipping anything in the States for that matter
You get the benefit of much much lower postal rates
here in Canada for some reason or another if they're two to three times as high and
I don't know why that is maybe it's because
The main shipping entity in Canada is owned by the government
Some people say that it's because we have a big country in a small population
But I don't know if that works for me. Vancouver's a pretty big population
so is Toronto and the shipping rates between those two cities are not anywhere near reasonable
So it's a mystery but we do have that disadvantage and where that factors into shipping plants
Is that if you were shipping bare root roses
Like some of the guys back east do or if you're shipping big plants and pots like this the price has become
Excessive to the point where your customer wouldn't pay those prices or shouldn't be asked to anyway
so I've been running my business locally here and the way I'd normally do it is I take cuttings of a plant and
Grow them up to this size here the next year. I pot them up into a gallon sized pot and
Bring them to the farmers market
I put a tag like that on it and then I sell it directly right there on the spot
That's be my distribution system. There's some advantages and disadvantages of that
One of the advantages is that you get direct customer feedback, like people see your plants
They'll buy them on the spot or not. They'll even tell you why they don't want to buy them
So from my point of view
it's been really valuable and collecting customer feedback about what plants customers want and
learning how my business should run
The disadvantage or the primary disadvantage is it is a lot of running around
Basically every weekend all the way through spring
I load up my van. I go to a local farmers market or a selling event for plants and I plan to
Bring a full van load and I come back
usually from that event with
Half of what I took with me because, by necessity
I have to guess and hope and wish and pray that those plants will sell at the farmers market
Without knowing what the customers actually want. I do get the benefit
I have to admit of some amount of pre-sales through my website or from Instagram or other ways that I advertise or even through
Craigslist
but I still come home with a lot of
Plants and it is a lot of hassle
The other thing is that I by necessity again
Limit my customers to what's local so I do a lot of collector roses
I do roses that are hard to find things that are you know
That people might be seeking after in the industry or in the hobby
But I'm limiting myself to those people who are quite local
So to that degree. I'm way better off choosing a plant that doesn't have specialty appeal
But it has wide appeal so that the people in the farmers market
I have the best chance of selling through but that's not the way I roll in terms of what I what plants I collect and
Propagate so I'd like to have the advantage of a wider audience or a wider
potential customer base across the country to sell through to so this year now
I'm considering doing and I'm setting up for it right now is an online store attached to my website
normally
I just use our website for a few blog postings and I put on there what events that will be appearing at that here
But now across the top of the screen. I've placed an online store. I've done that using
WordPress is the piece of software that I've used to set up my website initially and I've added on WooCommerce
Which is a free piece of software that allows me to set up an online store, and I want to show you
How it goes to set that up here. So I'm going to actually start recording on my screen here and
We'll see if I can show you
What this looks like. Okay. So on the screen here if I've done this. You'll see my WooCommerce screen here
I'm setting up items
for sale
for shipping and this one here is
The Rose Sophie's Perpetual now Sophie's Perpetual is an excellent Rose. I actually do well with it locally even
But it's a it's an exceptional in that it's like a China but it smells like a damask
so it has the flowers it has the
graceful habit of a China the smooth
Stems it
Kind of wanders around lax and low
but the flowers have that punchy fragrance of the Damask and
They start out light pink with a darker outside ring and then they darken as they aged which is a really neat feature
Of a Rose so Sophie's Perpetual here - I've put it in and I've priced it at
$15 and I've put it in stock with eight of them and then I just hit publish
And so what I've done is all the way through here
I've chosen all of the roses. I've got Buff Beauty. I've got Betty
Will, I've got Baron Girod de l'Ain which mentioned in my hybrid perpetual video
So I thought all of these listed here and once I published them then they show up in the online store
so I'm just going to click through to my site here and
Show you how the online store shows up
Now part of the consideration for
doing this and I'll do an aside here is that I
Want to keep the shipping expenses
Relatively low, so I'm actually choosing to sell in this size here. This is my 9 centimeter pot
Normally as I say I will talk this up into a gallon size
At the beginning of my season it would grow into the pot and then it'll be ready for sale at the farmers market
To save on shipping expenses. I'm gonna take my own-root roses
grown to the point where they are rooted nicely to the bottom of the pot and
I'm going to ship those directly to the customer, which means they are going to get a smaller rose
but they have the advantage of having a rose that's on its own roots that they might not be able to find elsewhere and that
The shipping costs may be a bit lower than if they bought something in a big honkin pot like this
So I want to show you on my site here the online store. I just hit click shop across the top there and
Assuming that it will load here. There we go
bad internet spot in the house
I
Have a listing of all of my roses here
Now a word quickly on some of the pictures that I've used here
because if you're setting up an online store one thing you have to have is pictures now some of these pictures of pictures that I've
taken myself in my garden other ones I had to
Glean from the internet and what I try to do when I'm taking pictures to use online is I try to pick pictures
That are Creative Commons licensed or licensed for sharing and a big THANK YOU to people who do that
It's a very public minded of you to share your pictures. So that people like me can use those
Or people can use I use in my videos a lot. So it's a great way to go about it and
As you click through to the to the item itself
Like friends here. I've got Rosa Fiona Stanley, I guess sometimes they might call that
the trade name Abbaye de Cluny
On the big picture here I
Give credit to the author
or photographer
And I thank them and put on the link to the Creative Commons license, which I've used on that
So that's as easy as it is. Now the next question becomes, how do I actually
ship these and
What policies do I set up for people to buy these and I've decided to do a couple of things to make it easy for
Myself one. I made a limited selling season. So I am only selling these in the month of
March
Through to the beginning of April and then I'm shipping them all in April 15th
which means that I
Won't have to try to run a shipping business at the same time as I'm just running my local business going to all the garden
Events that I go to
During the year, so that's one thing I doesn't make it easier for myself
the second thing I've done is I've basically
Chosen a box size that is well suited for shipping for plants
so the people who buy it will actually get their best deal if they
buy them in groups of four because that's the size of box that I've that have chosen it for and of course if they choose
Eight, then we'll ship it that way too. I've some experience to figure out on
How to pack that and how to work that out
So I'll be working on that as we hit the shipping date
But the other thing I wanted to mention is that in that WooCommerce app here that I mentioned
There's an extension that you can buy or an add-on
That allows you to get the Canada Post rates directly and that's what I've done
So that one actually the software that I've used to set up my site here is WordPress is free
Aside from the hosting that I have to pay for WooCommerce is free, but the Canada Post
Extension that I have to use and get the exact shipping rates for my customers
that I have to pay extra for so I paid something like
$80 us to get that extension added to my software so that if a person wants to figure out how much
Paying for shipping right away that they can do. So, all right
I hope I've covered off the basics around my consideration of
Doing mail-order and selling online
Let me know what you think of this change in my business, and if you have any questions, thanks