Do you need a landscape supply website to sell online?

What online ordering for bulk material has to handle

Selling a bag of fertilizer online is a solved problem. Selling twelve yards of mulch delivered to a job site is not. Before comparing options, it helps to list what the site actually has to do:

• Price delivery by the customer's address, not a flat fee
• Know how much each truck carries, and charge for the trips an order takes
• Sell by the cubic yard or ton, with sensible minimums
• Only offer delivery inside the area each yard serves
• Offer the delivery days and windows your trucks can actually run
• Collect sales tax for the delivery address
• Take payment up front, and refund or re-bill when an order changes
• Get the order to a driver, and show where the load was dropped
• Bring in customers, which means search, ads and local pages

Any of the options below can take a payment. The difference is how much of that list you'd be handling by hand, or paying someone to build.

Option 1: a general-purpose online store

Store builders, including Square Online, are quick to set up, look good, and are a fine home for your yard online. They're built for retail products, though. Delivery is usually a flat fee, or priced by zone or distance band, with no idea how much your trucks carry or how many trips an order takes. Large or awkward orders end up back on the phone, and you're responsible for bringing every visitor to the site.

Option 2: a custom-built site

A developer can build anything on the list above, and the site will be entirely yours. Expect to pay for the build, then for hosting, security updates and changes every time your pricing or trucks change. You still need dispatch and driver tools, a Square connection for payments and refunds, and a plan for getting traffic.

Option 3: sell on Soil Direct

Soil Direct is a marketplace built for bulk landscape materials. You sign in with Square, set your trucks, rates, radius and delivery windows, and your products are listed on soildirect.com with delivered prices worked out from your numbers. Payments go to your Square account, and the portal covers orders, delivery planning, driver links and reports.

You can also add a Buy button to your own website. Its checkout shows your logo, business name and colors, either on a Soil Direct checkout page or in a pop-up on your site, with the same delivered price and payment to your Square account.

The trade-offs, stated plainly:

• Your products sit on soildirect.com alongside other yards that deliver to the same address, and customers are shown the best delivered prices. You compete on price and distance.
• On soildirect.com, customers check out in Soil Direct's design. A Buy button on your own site opens a checkout in your logo and colors, but its layout and fonts stay Soil Direct's.
• Your yard is reviewed by the Soil Direct team before it goes live.

Option 4: both

Plenty of yards will want their own website for their name, hours, photos and walk-in customers. That doesn't have to compete with selling on Soil Direct: keep your site as your yard's home online, add a Buy button for the products you want to sell from it, and let Soil Direct handle delivered-price ordering, payment and dispatch.

Which one is right for your yard?

If most of your sales are walk-in and you mainly want to be found, a simple website is enough. If you have the budget and want everything under your own brand, a custom build can do it, at a price. If you want delivered-price orders coming in paid, with the delivery side organized, without building or maintaining anything, Soil Direct is made for that, and it works alongside whatever site you have.

See how getting started works, or read the supplier FAQ.