The Ultimate Guide To Selling Plants Online

If you have a green thumb and want to inspire others’ horticultural journeys, selling plants online can be a viable option for you. An online plant shop is versatile and can start as a passion project, letting you specialize in a few or many plants based on your interests and growing conditions. 

That’s how it happened for April Mall, who began selling her propagated plants so she could buy more and continue nurturing her pastime. April and her husband, Daryk Mall, grew Unsolicited Plant Talks from a hobby into a thriving business that quickly went from shipping 600 to 1,200 plants a month. They had to hire full-time and part-time employees to keep up with the demand. 

In this article, learn about how to start a plant business, where you can sell online, and how to safely ship plants, with tips from entrepreneurs who have done it. 

8 types of plant businesses

• Houseplants
• Outdoor plants
• Seeds and bulbs
• Terrarium and kits
• Plant-derived products
• Online courses and workshops
• Plant services
• Plant subscriptions

There are several ways to get into the plant business. Here are a few ideas to inspire you:

Houseplants 

Indoor plants can work for a wide range of people because they don’t require a garden. You might choose to specialize in a type of houseplant, such as succulents and air plants, or you might decide to sell the plants you can reliably grow or wholesale where you live. 

House Plant Shop focuses on houseplants and categorizes them by type (rare plants, trailing plants, dried plants, pet-friendly plants, and more), size (small air plants and large air plants), and even zodiac sign. 

Outdoor plants

With outdoor plants, weather, seasonality, and size can affect what you sell and how you handle shipping and delivery. 

Educating your customers can help them make informed decisions. The Sill, which originally sold houseplants before expanding into bushes and flowering trees, lets customers filter plants by growing zone. The brand also adds details like “hardy as a Midwestern winter” to guide customers to the best option. 

Seeds and bulbs

Seeds and bulbs are easier to ship and store than live plants, though selling them requires land access or relationships with farmers who can produce the seeds or bulbs for you.

Canada-based West Coast Seeds include growing information and photos of mature plants on their product pages so customers know what to expect. They also release a yearly growing guide and have an online quiz to help customers find the right seeds and supplies.

Terrariums and kits

Terrariums are a way to bring greenery indoors without taking up much space. Emma Sibley started London Terrariums, which sells both premade terrariums and DIY kits, because she loved gardening but didn’t have a garden of her own.

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Plant-derived products

If you have a green thumb and a home garden, you can grow plants and create products derived from them. The founders of Terre Bleu grow lavender on their farm and sell lavender-based soaps, sprays, and salves online.

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Online courses and workshops

Share your knowledge about plants and gardening with online courses and workshops. The Gardener’s Workshop offers a range of classes on topics such as flower farming and selling to florists, giving customers the tools they need to launch their own projects. 

Plant services

There are a few options for a service-based plant business. For example, you can supply plants for events or maintain green walls for corporate clients. Or try “planterior design,” a term plant shop Grounded uses to describe their private client consultation service, where they help clients find the right plants for their space. 

Plant subscriptions

With a subscription model, you can provide customers with a steady stream of new plant species (and predictable recurring revenue for your business).

Lively Root customers can decide to purchase individual indoor or outdoor plants, or opt for a themed subscription, like pet-friendly or easy to care for. 

Shopify store owners can set up subscriptions by downloading the free Shopify Subscriptions app.

Where to sell plants online

• Local marketplaces
• Ecommerce marketplaces
• Plant-specific marketplaces
• Your own website

The decision of where to sell your plants comes down to your business goals and target audience. Here are the main options:

Local marketplaces

A local marketplace, like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, is a good option if you don’t want to worry about shipping and packaging plants. Because your audience is local, they can pick up their items at a designated location. 

Ecommerce marketplaces

If you want to expand beyond local pickup, ecommerce marketplaces like Etsy and eBay let you sell plants online without launching a website. (Both platforms also support local pickup, though the process is a little more straightforward with eBay.)

You also can take advantage of a marketplace’s built-in audiences. For example, Etsy, which is known for handmade items, has 86.5 million active users, and eBay, which is known for collectible and rare items, has 136 million active buyers. 

The downside is fees: eBay charges a 13.6% final value fee (plus a 35¢ insertion fee if you list more than 250 items). Etsy has a 20¢ listing fee plus a 6.5% transaction fee for all items. 

Plant-specific marketplaces

With a plant-specific marketplace like Plantly, you can sell your plants where gardening enthusiasts already spend their time. 

Unlike general marketplaces like Etsy and eBay, Plantly requires new vendors to complete an onboarding process with a live demo call. Sellers can set their own shipping policies and communicate with buyers directly, but they can only ship within the US. Like Etsy and eBay, Plantly charges fees: There’s no listing fee, but there is a 6.75% transaction fee.

Your own website

Selling plants from your own website means you won’t have to pay fees to another platform. You’ll also get more control over your branding and access to valuable customer data. 

For Los Angeles–based shop Plant Material, Shopify’s built-in inventory tools have helped the team better forecast demand by giving them a bird’s-eye view of their inventory needs. 

“Shopify has really helped with that,” Cofounder Matthew Burrows says on Shopify Masters. “The general trend of seasonality in our business is the same. So you can really start to forecast what you need for the future season.”

How to sell plants online

1. Find your niche
2. Decide whether to grow or source your plants
3. Choose a business name
4. Legally establish your business
5. Price your plants
6. Figure out your approach to inventory
7. Build your online store
8. Safely ship plants
9. Devise a marketing plan

Here are steps to get your online plant business out of, or rather, off the ground: 

1. Find your niche

There are a number of ways to find a niche for your plant business, including focusing on your skills and interests, location, and target market. Competitive analysis can also give you insights into the market and how to stand out. 

For example, Matthew felt confident starting Plant Material because Los Angeles had few nurseries specializing in California native plants. Because big-box retailers also don’t sell those plants, Plant Material was able to own a niche store: introducing Angelenos to regional plants. 

“[Our mission is] generally to give people more access to these plants,” Matthew says. “When we started the business, there was a lack of access. And it still doesn’t exist in a way that can be found by the general public easily.” 

2. Decide whether to grow or source your plants 

Growing plants to sell is possible with the right space and conditions. April of Unsolicited Plant Talks started her business inside her home by propagating plants on racks. 

But selling plants on a larger scale requires more space, and you might quickly outgrow your setup. Eventually, April secured funding from NASA to build a greenhouse. “I found that NASA actually gives these loans for agriculture,” she said of the unexpected funding source.

Partly Sunny Projects Founder Sonja Detrinidad decided not to grow her own plants because it was easy to find experienced growers to partner with in her California area. “I have growers that have been growing certain varieties of plants for 40 years,” she says.

Ultimately, the decision comes down to your business model, skills, budget, and space.

3. Choose a business name

Your name can be straightforward, like London Terrariums, or more creative, like Unsolicited Plant Talks.

To help you come up with a name that fits your plant brand, try Shopify’s AI Business Name Generator. Describe your business—you can include your location or information about your offerings—and the tool generates various options. 

Before you commit to anything, check whether the name is taken on social media, on a domain, and in your state’s business entity database (typically through your local secretary of state’s office). 

4. Legally establish your business

How you register your business depends on where you live and the type of business you want to start. If you’re a solopreneur in the United States, decide whether a sole proprietorship or a limited liability company (LLC) is right for you. 

Starting an LLC typically requires more paperwork, but it can protect your personal assets from liability. Additionally, you may need to register your business with local and state government agencies. 

Check your local laws for any additional licenses you may need to sell live plants or seeds. For example, in California, you need a license to sell nursery stock. And, if you plan to hire employees, you may need an employer identification number (EIN) from the IRS.

5. Price your plants 

You can follow standard pricing models for pricing most goods for online sale. To find a retail price for your product and/or offerings:

• Add up your variable costs per product (cost of goods sold, packaging, shipping, etc.).
• Assign a price to your time and estimate the time you’ll spend per product. 
• Add up your fixed costs (overhead expenses, like rent) and divide by the average number of products you expect to sell per month. 
• Add a desired profit margin on top (consider the overall market).

Additionally, consider who your customers are and what they expect to pay. Washington, DC–based plant shop Grounded prices their plants between $18 and $85. 

“We strategically put our price points at a place that is affordable and accessible to most people,” says Grounded Cofounder Mignon Hemsley. “We want everyone to be able to experience having plants and being able to take care of something.” 

6. Figure out your approach to inventory

Unless you’re only selling outdoor plants, you might need a climate-controlled space for your inventory. Sonja of Partly Sunny Projects started in her garage before moving to a dedicated greenhouse space. 

Your storage needs will depend on what you sell, how you source products, and your budget. You might go the route Sonja did and use home space for storage while you establish your business. 

Or you might lease space in a warehouse. You might also consider dropshipping, a business model that lets you sell plants or plant-related products under your brand name while having them fulfilled by a third-party supplier, eliminating the need to store and manage retail inventory. 

7. Build your online store

Selling plants online through your website gives you the most control over your business. 

Sonja started by taking orders through a WhatsApp group chat and invoicing each customer. 

When that became too time-consuming, she opened an online store with Shopify. The switch helped her spend less time on paperwork and more time building her brand. 

Shopify’s AI store builder lets you quickly generate a personalized store based on a brief description of your business, no coding or design skills needed. You can also add apps to increase store functionality and sell on different platforms.

For example, you can use the Marketplace Connect app to sell plants on eBay and the Facebook & Instagram and TikTok apps to sell on social media, all from a single inventory managed via your Shopify admin.

8. Safely ship plants

Shipping and packing plants requires careful planning, and Sonja suggests planning for the worst-case scenario. “Imagine that your package is going to be in a rugby match until it gets to its destination,” Sonja says. “You have to do everything you need to do in order to protect it.” 

Packing your plants correctly ensures their survival—and customer happiness. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you determine your packing and shipping processes:

• Account for international shipping laws. There are laws that govern how soil and organic matter can travel over international borders, meaning there are some plants and seeds you can’t send to other countries. For example, Canada allows imports of soil from the continental US with the correct documentation, but not from other countries.
• Consider extreme climates. Extreme temperatures can damage plants, so take precautions to protect them. For example, if a plant will be subject to below-freezing temperatures in transit, add heat packs and use express shipping. 
• Time your shipment well. Time your shipping so it doesn’t sit around in a warehouse on a weekend, which can be rough on the plant. 

9. Devise a marketing plan

There are a mix of marketing channels you can use to grow your online audience. Here are a few to consider: 

Social media marketing

If you’re starting with a limited budget, social media is a way to grow your audience organically. You can try to post consistently and share useful information, like Sonja, who positioned herself as a plant expert on TikTok. This has allowed her to introduce customers to her brand without a heavy sales pitch. 

“Make yourself valuable on the platform as a source of information, then do a little sidestep like, ’Oh, by the way, here’s the link to my website,’” she says. “And they’re going to trust what you’re putting out there because they’re seeing results from the things that you’ve advised them to do.”

Press

Earned media can boost your awareness and credibility. For example, Grounded was struggling to gain traction on social media and with their newsletter. “Danuelle made her dad an Instagram so he could be our 100th follower,” Mignon says of her Grounded Cofounder, Danuelle Doswell. 

Then, Danuelle wrote a press release that highlighted Grounded’s subscription programs—an offering that helped the company stand out—and shopped it around to local DC publications. One picked it up, and the brand’s follower account surged to 8,000; 700 people signed up for the newsletter.

Content marketing

The idea behind content marketing is to create and publish helpful content to build trust with your audience. For example, Epic Gardening was a blog before becoming a plant shop, but they still use their blog and YouTube channel to provide helpful content their customers can trust.

“We have a staff horticulturist, and then all of our writers are garden writers,” Founder Kevin Espiritu says on an episode of Shopify Masters. 

“They’re trained in some kind of gardening. Maybe their specialty is flowers, ornamentals, or bushes. We’ll pick the right writer for the right topic. All our articles pass through what we call a ‘hort’ review: Our horticulturist will look at it, check it for accuracy.”