What’s trimming your margins? There’s a good chance there are many factors. Changing prices, seasonality, time-consuming product hunts—can all shrink your margins.
As economic activity rebounds from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, consumers and businesses will have a renewed ability to pay for professional landscaping (woot woot!). We've outlined four key opportunities to take advantage of to keep you excited and motivated for the year ahead.
Whether you've found your rhythm working from home, or you're struggling to get the most of out your day, we wanted to share some tools we'd recommend to keep you organized, communicating effectively, and collaborating with your team with ease. Even if you aren't working from home, you may find some of these tools helpful regardless. At LandscapeHub, we particularly love the money and time-saving tool, Grasshopper, included in our list below.
Whether you're a landscape contractor, nursery professional, or a retail garden center employee, you work on deadlines with customers depending on you to hit those important dates. To help you manage your time efficiently, consider these proven productivity hacks that will bring you more time in your day.
We’ve all been there. While you’re swamped with day-to-day operations and trying to keep ahead of work during the crazy busy season, your company’s trying to update its website with your latest, greatest projects—but clients’ work takes priority, your forté isn’t web design, and you’d rather not spend your weekend figuring out how to code. We get it. Now, more than ever, companies are very aware of how their businesses look online, and are more invested in spending time to make sure they can be found easily and leave a good impression. In addition to joining a marketplace like LandscapeHub to increase visibility, you may find time in hiring a freelancer or two to take on a couple of projects to update your website or social channels. Luckily, there’s an easy solution to find tech support to keep your business functioning and your online presence fresh and relevant.
It can be challenging to stay up-to-date on all the trends and happenings in an industry that continues to grow and change. Especially now, when all of us outdoorsy types are spending more time than ever at home, it's essential to stay inspired by the world around us. We thought it would help share some of the resources we turn to time and time again when we want the scoop on the latest innovations and new products coming to the market.
As a buyer considering participating in an online market need only look at his or her current sourcing model. Do any of these statements sound familiar?
Digital sales channels (such as e-commerce websites, amazon, content marketing, affiliate marketing) aren’t new, but because of a variety of factors (time, money, knowledge), you might not have ventured far into exploring solutions for your business. As discussed in last week's post, it can require a huge investment to travel that path on your own. With the right strategy, however, using digital channels for your nursery and landscape supply business can turn into a successful venture.
If you do currently offer online sales, you can attest to the complexity of it. When the channel is something you have to maintain yourself, you find out that it is more complicated than putting photos of products with prices on your website. You also have to consider payment methods and set up merchant accounts. You have to make sure your website is secure. And that’s just the beginning! While there is value in having your own e-commerce site, maintaining your own e-commerce site is not always the most efficient way to do it. Costs and the ability to connect to others in the supply chain limit what you can do on your own.
Advantages of Online Marketplaces Over Individual E-Commerce Efforts
Operating on a marketplace is different than sustaining your own e-commerce market on your own website. On your own, you’d have to foot the bill for the technology and features you need. That’s not all, though.
Joining a Marketplace Allows You to Grow without Massive Investments of Time and Money
Getting your product in front of buyers is actually the hardest part of the whole enterprise. Even if you put together an e-commerce site, you’re limited to your existing buyers and the few new buyers you can attract to your website. Growing your digital audience (and pool of customers) involves sophisticated digital strategy. You can’t just expect to “build it and they will come.”
When you become part of a marketplace, your business automatically reaches more buyers. But, it won’t be your investment in marketing that boosts revenue, but the platform’s investment. This is beneficial because you’re a landscape supplier, not a tech company. When you join a specialized marketplace like LandscapeHub, where the company that created it is a technology company that also has expertise in landscaping, everyone wins, because everyone is working in their area of expertise. You can concentrate on supplying great product and the marketplace can concentrate on growing the customer base.
Benefits of Marketplaces
Well-constructed marketplaces heal broken supply chains, which improves the experience for all stakeholders.
In addition to growing without your own massive investments, marketplaces offer these advantages:Online platforms assist you with delivery. It’s not solely up to you to figure out how to get things. This functionality allows logistics to be much smoother.
You receive data that you can leverage to better respond to the market.
You may learn from your platform transactions that certain plants are in greater demand than others. You might notice trends before others. This information could help you optimize your pricing and influence your product offering, giving you a tremendous competitive edge over those not on the platform.
All buyers are vetted.
A marketplace evaluates the buyers just as they do the sellers. You can be assured that those on the platform are legitimate companies.
Ordering and fulfillment is streamlined.
Quoting, ordering, payments, and delivery managed in one place saves time, which earns you money. If you spend less time chasing e-commerce challenges, you have more time to do important things for the health and growth of your business.
Receive benefits of aggregation and cooperation.
Being a supplier on a marketplace increases your ability to reach more potential buyers, which means more orders.
With all these clear benefits, it’s easy to see why the nursery and landscape supply industry is shifting to online marketplaces. These are the same benefits that successful marketplaces in other industries such as Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon bestow on participants.
An industry-built marketplace like LandscapeHub brings this to the green industry and helps both buyers and sellers.
Tune in next week for part three of our series where we'll be covering marketplace advantages for buyers!
This past fall, we partnered with LandOne Takeoff Service to make project management even easier for LandscapeHub users. The cloud-based software was founded by Josh Martin, who, after years of working in the green industry, wanted to provide a more simple, easy-to-use, cost-effective solution for managing the bid process. He looked around and found nothing, so he built LandOne to make bidding and materials acquisition easier. (Sound familiar?)
You know the feeling: you’re excited to meet with your client, who’s looking to you to design and create a gorgeous, lush oasis. You pull up for the initial meeting, your brain filled with images of fabulous, bright blooms and sun-loving shrubs, only to be greeted with—trees. Dozens of huge, stately trees with nearly-bare soil underneath, and perhaps—to make it even more interesting—a slope or two with exposed roots from erosion. You quickly reset your brain before chatting with your new client, filing away the sun-loving design you anticipated for a calming, serene shade landscape. But what to do about that slope and those bare spots under the trees? No worries! We’re here to help you fill in those shady blank spots. Take a look at our favorite low-maintenance shade groundcovers for your landscape designs!