Online plant specialist, Joy of Plants, has integrated its web offering with WooCommerce to make its portfolio of more than 14,800 UK plant images/descriptions available to buy via participating retailers, effectively giving them an instant image library to help sell their own plants.
The founder and managing director of Joy of Plants, Terri Jones, said: “During the COVID-19 lockdowns this year, we were able to help garden centres set up online stores and/or click & collect systems, which have been extremely popular. They were a huge help to many of their customers, especially the elderly and vulnerable, who appreciated this new level of service and it’s been very lucrative for sellers too. We predict that the popularity of webshops and click & collect services will continue to rise through 2021.
“We realised we could make the process of creating and updating webshops easy and quick for retailers by developing a solution that allows an online shop to use our photo and text library. As we all know, pictures sell plants.
“Our WooCommerce plugin, for the industry’s favourite webshop platform, is quick to install from the official WordPress plugin directory and easy to use. Even non-technical staff can set it up. We manage the indexing and copyright control of all images supplied via our library. Retailers can use them with confidence, knowing they have the right image for each plant and that they have permission to use each image, so there’s no danger of copyright infringement or unexpected fees for use of images.
“This plugin is the latest innovation in our services for webshops and websites, as we now support retailers using WordPress/WooCommerce, Shopify and Bluepark ecommerce platforms with our library.
“In addition to adding images and text to the individual pages, the plugin can be used to add our plant finder to the site, seamlessly linking to the pages to provide a plant finding front end, additional plant descriptions, and care product recommendations for individual plants, to increase sales of sundries as well.”
The MD of Joy of Plants is Terri Jones, a veteran of the software industry and keen gardener. Like many modern software companies, the team is diverse and distributed, with Software Development, Design and Sales functions in the UK and beyond.
In the past ten years Joy of Plants has grown almost entirely by word-of-mouth, with just a few appearances at trade shows. It now has more than 200 retail clients, large and small, including many of the best-known Garden Centres and Garden Centre Groups in the UK.
If you are a garden centre, nursery or other retail business which would like to integrate with Woocommerce but you don’t already have a website, get in touchw with our IT partner, Denre Bruins, for an fast, effective and very affordable web-hosting, website creation and ecommerce solution. Prices start from just £20 a month. Denre@halcyonpr.com / 01442 863646
