After success launching a D2C business in lockdown, Double H Nurseries (parent company to The Horti House) launched and created The Horti House. This came after seeing a market gap and strategic opportunity to not only supply end consumers and supermarkets but also the ever-expanding and growing sector of garden centres and florists.
The challenge
The Horti House and Double H tested and saw an opportunity in the wholesale area, but were set up to either serve individual customers from a Shopify D2C platform or use SAP B1 for their supermarket ERP system. Neither fitted what was needed for a fast-growing new business, and they didn’t have a platform in place that could support this level of expansion successfully.
The business needed a tool that allowed them to build multiple price lists and could scale as their business and audience grew. The Horti House has a huge range of customers, and wanted to ensure that, depending on the size of order and frequency of delivery, they could offer pricing that reflected the service level and costs to fulfil the same plants in different formats.
They also had a range of shipping methods based on order rules and product type. For example, some plants are shipped in boxes, some on pallets, and some on trolleys. This also links to pricing, as the business needs to adjust product pricing based on transportation fees to ensure relevant costs are covered.
The Horti House wanted a way for buyers to switch between types of ordering and needed stock levels and shipping availability to reflect this. For example, if buyers were placing box-level orders, they had to meet specific thresholds and could only purchase certain items. For larger orders, the business wanted customers to be able to view and add a wider range of products.
The Horti House use several other tools within their B2B tech stack, meaning they needed an eCommerce platform that could manage their integrations. The business wanted to get set up quickly, while allowing for scalable success and futureproofing their integration requirements.
The solution
Using Shopify as their base eCommerce platform, The Horti House used the native tagging system to build out their B2B customer base.
This allows customers to enjoy a truly personalised experience when they log in, with all visible pricing bespoke to their order history with the brand. The business also built custom order rules, securing their profit margins while providing a comprehensive customer experience. The company uses SparkLayer’s Sales Agent feature so that internal teams can place orders for their customers, like garden centres, and for support in their offices.
SparkLayer worked closely with the team on their custom requirements, bringing in eCommerce agency, Haslo, to support complex development work. This included building out item dimension lists and a dynamic calculator to approve qualifying combinations.
Haslo custom-coded an additional feature on top of their eCommerce website with SparkLayer. This allows customers to toggle between ‘trolley’ and ‘box’ pricing groups - trolley-filtered items being cheaper, and often unavailable for box orders.
Their trolley-building tool dynamically builds trolleys for B2B buyers, using real-time logic to show a visual of tessellation and cross-item compatibility. Customers have a visual of their trolley fullness, and, using SparkLayer’s minimum order rules, cannot check out until a specific threshold is met and the order is qualified as operationally efficient.
The results
The trolley building functionality not only creates an enhanced customer experience, but also ensures The Horti House maintain their profit margin. The business needed to cover transport costs and required a UX-focused, customer-friendly way to display this information and qualifying data.
In addition, the business has seen an increase in operational efficiency. They needed a way to ensure orders that pass the minimum requirements are still efficient to ship. There was a concern that certain orders would meet the value threshold but be spread across multiple trolleys due to issues with product dimensions not tessellating efficiently. The dynamic trolley builder ensures that orders not only meet the thresholds but are stacked and shipped in a cost-efficient manner.
The company also uses SparkLayer’s pre-ordering functionality to manage their two peak seasons each year - namely, Christmas and Mother’s Day. The business can now take pre-orders ahead of these months, while other orders can be placed a week or two weeks in advance using their custom date-picker.
The week-picker tool is an enhanced feature built by Haslo to work alongside the business’ SparkLayer setup. This feature allows customers to select shipment to pick products up to 26 weeks in advance. This connects to The Horti House’s SAP to understand expected stock levels each week. A customer can select a delivery week when they land on the site, using Haslo’s custom JSON work to show customers what will and won’t be available for that week. It takes into consideration orders placed, unfulfilled, and expected incoming stock.
This tool has removed manual intervention and back-and-forth over emails, as customers can instantly view what items they can order - and when. This is especially important for forecasting, as they’re selling fresh produce and want to avoid wastage.
The Horti House built video tutorials to support buyers in utilising the B2B tools, ensuring smooth onboarding and speedy time-to-first-order.
“It’s been really important to give customers options based on what they need, and to allow customers to change between price lists dynamically. We needed a user-friendly website which customers can navigate as if they’re just doing their shopping, so SparkLayer has been invaluable here. We’ve been using the Sales Agent tool since day one, and it’s been a great bit of functionality. When we first implemented SparkLayer, we asked for developer recommendations. We needed ones who already had a relationship with SparkLayer and understood the B2B angle. Haslo came out of that conversation, and we’ve been working with them, alongside SparkLayer, ever since." ~ Ed Hill, Founder
Explore more
To learn more about Horti House, their product range, and the story of their brand, visit their website.
To see how SparkLayer works with Shopify, you can explore via the links below: