Wholesale Listings for Florist Buyers
I feel like I have quite a lot to share about this topic from the perspective of a small farmer with multiple income streams from cut flowers. What I can say is that I think maintaining a well-oiled wholesale program for florist buyers can be very difficult, especially if you are also offering your flowers in other ways like in retail arrangements or design work.
Managing Florist Expectations:
Many florists have become accustomed to ordering from larger wholesalers who almost always have certain items in stock, because they are collected from all over the world. This long term availability of certain crops that otherwise have a short local season is appealing to florists who are planning events a long ways in advance.
The first challenge you will face if you want to list flowers for wholesale is trying to determine what you will have and when and how far in advance you feel comfortable sharing that information. Some florists would like to order from you weeks or even months in advance. Far before you know how weather and the season will affect your crops. If you have smaller quantities, it will be especially difficult for you to try and promise availability with any certainty.
I choose to list our wholesale items for sale on my website in a member area where only registered buyers can shop.
Side note: Wholesale buyers should be providing you with their resale forms so that you can prove that you were selling your flowers legally untaxed. (If you are located in a state that collects sales tax
Listing Products:
Through my web shop, I’m able to list quantities and those quantities automatically go down as items are purchased. I receive a notification by email of each sale and I can also look up orders in the back end of my website or with the mobile app. I can mark orders ready for pick-up (notification goes to buyer via email) if that’s how my buyer is coming to get them. Shipped orders are automatically cleared out once we process them, with notifications of shipment and tracking info sent by email to the buyer.
The Alternatives:
The alternatives seem too overwhelming to me.
I don’t want to have to manage some other platform or lose income to a subscription platform or a higher credit card processing fee. (I’ve tried Rooted Farmers. It did not work for us, because there was only one buyer in our area that was willing to come pick up at our farm.)
I don’t want to add additional communication steps to the process. If I was to share a spreadsheet list for example what follows terrifies me: an email back with a proposed order, a trip around the farm to make sure the inventory still exists and was’t taken for another project, an email back to say “yes” or “no” on certain items and “do you approve?” Another email or call: “yes, I approve, please place the order,” And then maybe even more communication: Thank you for your order here is your invoice, when will you be coming to get your flowers?
I also don’t want to have to add additional steps to arrange for delivery or shipping services and extra billing outside of a wholesale flower platform that is not our own.
Communicating New Listings:
So that’s how we’re managing out wholesale lists for the time being. Squarespace email marketing campaigns allow me to quickly contact all of our buyers an alert them to new listings or sales. I can draft an email and just pop in product blocks in the same way that I share Pro Plan posts in your monthly Pro Platform round up newsletters.
Let me know if you have any questions. If you’re interested in the flower shipping mini course, you can learn more here.
And if you’re struggling to sort out how to even get started with a web presence for your business, don’t worry! Our website basics course is coming up and we’ll help you get everything in order soon!
