Online ordering that fueled real growth.
Forest Lake moved the majority of its wholesale customers onto online ordering — eliminating a full-time data-entry role and shrinking seven-page pick lists down to one.
Luke Venable
- Location
- Florence, South Carolina
- Operation
- Retail garden center + wholesale nursery
- Known for
- High-quality flowers for high-end garden centers
- Customers
- Garden centers and wholesale buyers
Orders arrived by text, fax, and email — and got re-typed by hand.
Forest Lake sells some of the highest-quality flowers in the region, but the back office ran on QuickBooks Online and a stack of Excel and Google Sheets. Orders came in by text message, fax, and email, in every format imaginable — and each one had to be re-typed into the accounting system by hand.
Every re-keyed order was a chance to send the wrong product. Pickers worked from availability sheets that ran six or seven pages long, flipping back and forth and missing items along the way. Errors meant redoing orders and driving the truck back out to customers. During peak season, the data entry alone was close to a full-time job.
A technology partner built for horticulture.
Luke came into the nursery from a software background, so he knew there had to be a better way to handle the problems he saw every day. What drew him to Plantiful was that it was new technology aimed squarely at horticulture — an industry that tends to lag on tooling — and a team willing to listen and build for an operation his size.
Up and running as fast as the data was ready.
Onboarding came down to cleaning up data and getting it into the system. The Plantiful team stayed a text, call, or Zoom away through the whole process — organizing the data, configuring the operation, and training the staff.
Some team members were ready on day one; others were skeptical. But after a couple of weeks, and especially once busy season proved the new process held up, the skeptics turned into believers.
The team at Plantiful held our hands through the whole onboarding process — always a text, a call, or a Zoom away from solving any problem with our data. If your information is ready to go, you can be up and running in a couple of weeks.
Customers enter their own orders — and pickers work from one page.
The biggest change was online ordering. Forest Lake worried adoption would be slow, but the majority of customers started entering their own orders almost as soon as the portal opened, telling the team it was easier than the old Excel file. Each order used to take about 15 minutes to key in; now it lands in the system the moment a customer places it.
Pick lists that once ran as long as the full availability sheet now print to a single page about 80% of the time. Every product carries a location tag, so pickers no longer walk greenhouse to greenhouse or call over a walkie-talkie to find stock. Picking accuracy went up, picking time went down, and overtime came with it.
The majority of our customers started ordering online as soon as we opened it up. Each order used to take about 15 minutes to input — now it comes straight into the system. We're at about 65 to 70% of customers ordering online today.
Enough confidence to add a third truck.
Cutting the data-entry workload let Forest Lake retire a near-full-time position — roughly $20,000 a year in savings — and turn that role toward customers instead of a backlog of orders. Picking accuracy on the wholesale side fueled real production growth.
Now Luke is looking at a third truck, confident that the online ordering portal is what customers want and that it can keep driving sales.
We're looking at a third truck just because we're confident that our online ordering portal is what customers want. I don't think we would have had the growth we had this year without implementing Plantiful.
The features behind the story.
Online Ordering
The customer portal that drove Forest Lake's growth.
See how it worksSticker & Label Printing
Location tags so pickers find stock the first time.
See how it worksLogistics
Shorter pick lists and fewer trips back to the customer.
See how it worksQuickBooks Integration
Orders flow to QuickBooks Online without re-keying.
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Book a walkthrough with our team and see how Plantiful works for an operation like yours.