BlogYour market, updated
The orders your phone never takes
Ask a wholesale grower how orders come in and the answer is usually the phone, a few emails and the regulars who turn up at the yard, which the surveys say is typical. What they cannot count is the orders that never came in, because the buyer could not get through or did not know what was ready.
How nursery orders are placed today
The fullest picture comes from the National Green Industry Survey, run by university researchers, which asked 2,170 growers and plant dealers how their 2018 sales were placed. About half of all sales were made in person. The telephone came next with 24 per cent, rising to 28 per cent for growers, and websites and email together made up about 17 per cent. In nine states, Ohio and Massachusetts among them, the phone carried more than half of all sales.
The newer federal figures point the same way. The USDA's 2024 Census of Horticultural Specialties counted $18.3 billion of sales, of which $507 million went through a channel it calls mail order or internet. By our arithmetic that is under 3 per cent, and because the category counts mail order as well, the share ordered online is smaller still.
Growers already use the internet on the other side of the trade. A USDA survey found that in 2025 half of all US farms used it to buy inputs, while 29 per cent used it to market what they produce. Those figures cover agriculture as a whole rather than nurseries, but many growers will know the pattern of buying supplies online and taking orders by phone.
What a phone line cannot do
A phone order can only be placed when the buyer reaches someone free to take it. In spring the people who know the stock are out in the rows, and a landscaper planning tomorrow's job at nine in the evening has nobody to ring. Some call back in the morning, and others order from whichever nursery answered first.
The call also limits what gets sold. A buyer asks about the plants they already have in mind and someone goes to check. The other lines that are ready on the benches never come up, because nobody on either end of the call had a reason to mention them.
Each order is then written down twice, once on a slip during the call and again when someone types it into the books. That gives two chances to get a size or a quantity wrong, and a third when the price is remembered rather than looked up.
What buyers say they want
Buyers in other trades have moved further. In a Gartner survey of 632 business buyers in 2024, 61 per cent said they would prefer to buy without dealing with a sales representative at all. They were business buyers in general rather than plant buyers, and Gartner sells advice to sales teams, so the figure shows a direction rather than a forecast for nurseries. Set beside the 17 per cent of green industry sales placed through websites and email, it suggests that much of the demand for ordering online is waiting on the seller.
Why we built Sprout
Sprout is made by SBI Software, which puts full ERP systems into large nurseries, so we know what those projects cost. Published figures for putting a general business ERP into a small business commonly run from $25,000 to $150,000 in services alone, which is money a family nursery does not have and should not need to spend so that a landscaper can order online.
Every nursery on Sprout gets its own shop with its own link. You walk your rows and say what you see, and by the end of the row your plant list and your shop exist, with each buyer seeing prices at their own level. Card payments through Stripe are coming next. You will connect your nursery's own Stripe account from Sprout's settings, buyers will be able to pay by card when they order, and each payment will be recorded against the order. There is nothing to install, no consultant and no implementation fee, only a monthly subscription. If you would like to see what your own shop would look like, book a time with us.