The horticulture industry is booming on the Internet

Almost one in four e-businesses on the Shoper software is a store in the "Home and Garden" industry. Their owners have had their hands full for the past few weeks, with sales 29 percent higher than in the winter months and up 34 percent over last year's season. Renovations are increasingly likely to start with online shopping.

Summer is the harvest season for online commerce as well. Data from Shoper, the largest provider of e-commerce software in Poland, shows successive increases in almost all categories. One of the store sectors with the fastest sales growth in recent weeks is Home and Garden. This is also the type of e-commerce stores that have been the largest in Poland for several years.

Poles like to decorate

According to the "Multi Challenges" report published by Shoper in early 2019, as many as 23 percent of stores on the platform offered assortments from the Home and Garden category. The second largest group was Clothing (18 percent), followed by Health and Beauty (13 percent), Children (9 percent), Sports and Travel (7 percent).

- Home and Garden leads in our listings in part because it is a very capacious category. It includes stores selling home furnishings, gardening equipment, renovation-related products and also pet accessories," explains Dominik Cisoń, Customer Success Specialist at Shoper , "At the same time, it's a category that fits Polish society very well. In recent decades we have been getting rich quickly, moving to bigger apartments and houses, or redecorating our interiors and gardens every few years to match our status and current fashion. At the same time, we still like to do it cheaply, cleverly, originally so we like to shop online," notes an expert at Shoper.

Gardens are also growing online

Between January and May 2019, the cumulative number of transactions at stores in the Home and Garden category running on Shoper software increased by more than 40 percent, and preliminary results from June show that this trend continues. A similar seasonal jump in sales occurred last spring. On average for a store in this industry, the May 2019 result was 29 percent better than the January result. This shows that both home and garden accessory e-commerce sales are increasing and the number of stores themselves is growing.

Often the key to success is finding a niche for the store. - Experiments by 19th-century-born Austrian naturalist Viktor Schauberger showed that gardening and farming tools made of copper have a positive effect on soil health and crop quality. However, it was only relatively recently that enthusiasts began making such tools. Our store started with copper and bronze tools, but we soon expanded the store's offer to include books on organic, natural plant growing or gardening calendars ," says Kacper Puchalski, creator of the Uprawiaj.pl store, whose success in selling high-quality accessories also proves how developed the gardening branch of the Polish e-commerce market is.

Proof of the garden industry's popularity online is also evidenced by the phenomenon of the Green Emergency Service and related social media sites. Michalina Trempala, together with her father Gregory, provide advice to novice gardening enthusiasts. Their Facebook and YouTube profiles are followed by more than 50,000 people. In their videos, they deal with and challenges of arranging home gardens. They also regularly arrange hour-long lays in which they answer questions from viewers. Over time, they decided that in addition to selling proven patents in their channels, they could also sell an assortment of products, and became the faces of an e-store they co-create with a friendly company.