Shipping Wholesale Flowers
Selling and shipping wholesale flowers to customers who are a distance from you can be a challenge. Here are a number of helpful tips. In this example, we’re shipping 10-stem tulips bunches.
Listing Tulips Wholesale Tax-Free
We list our tulips on a wholesale-only website. It’s a sort of sister website to our retail site. We maintain two sites for Little Farmhouse Flowers due to the discrepancy in sales tax. If you live in a “no sales tax” site, I recommend simply setting up a hidden password-protected wholesale shop on your current site. I can help you set up a new site or re-configure your current site via a one hour zoom consultation.
In New York, we must collect an 8% sales tax and we aren’t able to “remove” that description from wholesale orders on our retail site. So I set up a paired down site with only a few pages and purchased www.littlefarmhousewholesale.com to host it. The shops on this site are password protected. Some are also hidden and accessible only by a shared link (I do this for short-term offerings, like tulip bulbs for students in The Tulip Workshop).
Regular wholesale flower buyers can choose from either “Wholesale Flower Shop” or “Market Bouquets”. The former online store hosts our like-kind wholesale flower bunches, like 10-stem tulip bunches. The latter hosts pre-wrapped market bouquets for sale to independent grocers and other retail shops who are just looking to re-sell a prepared product. This makes ordering and pre-payment easy for customers.
Previously, we billed our wholesale buyers separately for shipping. They ordered and paid for wholesale flowers online and if they wanted shipping I would type up an email and invoice from Quickbooks. This process was a bit tedious, and this year we are streamlining wholesale web ordering to include shipping fees. This will eliminate the mystery around the shipping fees (since customers will see them at checkout) and save me the time and stress of having to send out all those extra invoices post-shipment.
We typically email our wholesale customers about the start of the season and then maintain a listing of tulips that will be available in about 1-2 weeks. We do not list flowers earlier than a couple of weeks, except for Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day because we have dialed those holidays in and we know our wholesale clients need to plan ahead significantly for those dates.
Set up:
Decide upon a standard box size and determine an approximate weight for a box filled with flowers. We use twin wall 8-inch x16-inch x24-inch boxes. (see below for box ordering information)
Account for the cost of each box and other packing materials.
Set up a sample order to determine the overnight shipping cost for each customer.
Set a specific shipping fee linked to each customer’s zip code on our wholesale website.
Ordering boxes:
Uline: $3.18 per box for 20 boxes ($63.60) + tax ($7.875) + UPS Ground ($33.30) = $104.65 for 20 boxes ($5.23 per box) (single wall)
Aviditi: $72.41 for 20 boxes. Free Amazon shipping. $3.62/box (single wall)
Buckeye Corrugated, custom-cut boxes: $3.64 per box (double wall). Note: this price is for a total purchase of 675 boxes. There is a significant investment here for us. But for our operation- it makes good financial sense. If I was only shipping lower quantities, I’d stick with single-wall Aviditi boxes.
We are moving to sign a contract with Buckeye Corrugated for our boxes due to the quality and low price for sturdy twin-wall boxes. We can also have our boxes custom printed or vented with custom-cut holes (we’ll do this for wholesale bulb shipments in the future). Buckeye Corrugated has a number of locations that aren’t even listed on their website. We have a factory right near us in Plattsburgh. They produce all the boxes for Gardener’s Supply, The Vermont Teddy Bear Company, and many more regional businesses.
Other packaging for shipping
Craft paper wrappers from A-Roo, size 12 inch x 12 inch x 4.5 inch
Rubber bands
Newsprint or bubble wrap/re-used packaging from other packages we’ve received here.
Carriers:
We primarily ship by FedEx Priority Overnight. In some cases, we can move flowers to a customer overnight with UPS Ground. We use Shipstation to determine shipping rates and print labels.
Our account with Cal Flowers allows us access to reduced overnight shipping rates for FedEx. This reduction can be around $70! A package that might cost about $100 will cost us only $30. If you are considering shipping fresh flowers wholesale or retail - it is really a must because the cost is otherwise prohibitive for most people who will be interested in buying your flowers. My reduced FedEx prices are automatically applied in Shipstation.
We can ship FedEx overnight for arrivals Tuesday-Saturday. Saturday delivery costs a little bit more, so we typically do not offer it unless a florist is in a bind or bad weather forces our hand. In this case, we will be providing 2 separate shipping options- a lower-priced Tuesday-Friday arrival rate and a higher Saturday rate. For reference, the current postage for shipping the box in this video is $41.23 for Saturday delivery or $31.83 for weekday arrival. The boxes are headed from our farm in northern New York to the greater New York City metropolitan area (about a 6-hour drive away from here).
Have any questions? Please share a comment with us!