Retail on the internet is an exploding industry, with virtually no limits the range and breadth of products and services that are offered for sale on the web; everything that you can purchase through traditional bricks-and-mortar retail can also be sourced online.

But what about the online retail experience? How does it compare? And how much of a factor is that hands-on component of the traditional retail process in your consideration of an online garden center purchase? The best way to answer that question is to compare the primary differences between traditional garden center shopping and online garden centers in four attributes: access, availability, price and service.

Access to Online Garden Centers

Online retail means shopping from the comfort of your computer keyboard. The web shopping process has the potential to unearth a broad range of comparable products from an infinite number of sources; you can compare brands, models, features and price to a dizzying degree of detail; the shopper theoretically is always in the right place at the right time, especially in the case of products and services which are trendy, seasonal or tend to vary widely in price.

And access becomes a primary factor when traditional retail access is difficult – whether because of geography, weather, mobility or other restrictions, the online garden center it can provide access that would otherwise be difficult to impossible.

But online garden centers have a fundamental weakness: the lack of instant gratification, because you leave the retail store with your purchase in-hand, confident in the fact that you are bringing home exactly what you have selected.

Your Choice: Product Availability Through Online Garden Centers

There is no doubt that the widest possible product choice is potentially online; whether your criteria is breadth of choice in the kinds of plant products offered, or the myriad variations in style, colour or environmental preferences, perusing product availability through one or more online garden centers will give you a much wider assortment from which to choose. But therein also lies one of the largest disadvantages: you may be tempted to choose a product that will not perform according to specification – for example, a particular annual that is not compatible with the typical temperature norms in your particular region. While online garden centers attempt to provide this information, they cannot completely understand the environment in which your garden will be planted.

What About Before and After Service?

In line with your retail shopping expectation is the ability to interact with the sales staff; style, trends, technical and product knowledge (and even their personal opinions) are a big factor in your decision to purchase. Typically the more aesthetic the decision, the more you rely on this interaction to reach your decision to proceed; this interaction is not possible in an online garden center, regardless of their claim to the contrary.

And there are inevitably those instances where the product you purchased does not meet your needs; being able to confide in the retail staff, and solicit their assistance in correcting the situation is invaluable in your success in saving the day. Undeniably, online garden centers, as have all online retailers, have made great efforts to provide the shopper with as much support as, and equally to offer the shopper satisfactory recourse if the product does not live up to your expectations. But how satisfactory are these efforts?

Experience will remind you of the difficulty to gain after-sale satisfaction from many online retailers; in the case of many online garden centers, viability of the products is not covered by the same resolution you typically receive in the garden center, exchanging a plant that simply did not like your garden. Guarantees of viability exist; instantaneous solutions do not.

The Price You Pay

An online garden center has the potential to offer you a much wider assortment of horticultural products, because they don’t require physical inventory in; because they do not have to manage inventory, storage, shrinkage, staff, and other cost drivers, they are in a position to offer a better price than you would pay in a traditional retail store.

It is in this fourth comparator between the retail experience and using an online garden center that is probably the safest risk; when all is totaled up, the lower price you may pay may alleviate any financial loss or dissatisfaction that may occur.