I'm also trying to start up a small online plant shop but am finding it hard to a) get the growing space, and b) get the interesting stock - would love to hear about how you dealt with these issues when first starting up! :)
I ship in the EU and any other countries that have trade deals that allows plant transfer without requiring phytosanitary certificates (Switzerland for example)! Sadly after Brexit I don't know if I will still be able to ship over the UK :(
Finding the growing space is hard, especially if your plants are big. Thankfully I focus mostly on the Drosera genus, which are mostly small plants. I can fit multiple plants in a 7x7cm pot. I grow the winter-hardy ones in a greenhouse, the tropical ones are grown inside under LEDs.
Finding rare species is not too hard if you have good contacts in the community (I've been part of it for more than 10 years, so it was relatively easy for me). The hard part is propagation. Thankfully for me, a lot of Drosera are really easy to propagate by leaves cuttings but for the species that are not easily propagated, I work with an university that propagate them in tissue culture for me.
Good luck with your project, it requires a lot of work but if you're passionate about it, it won't feel like work!
I've had good luck growing a few Drosera from seed, never even thought about leaf cuttings, that's super interesting!
Hopefully depending on Brexit I'll be able to order from you next Spring! Do you have a mailing list or something?
Looking forward to send you plants, make sure to say you're from hacker news in the notes of your order ;) I don't have a mailing list yet, although that is a good idea and I will look into it for the next season!
- There's basically no competition, except maybe other hobbyists that trade or sell their excess plants (which is basically what I do, but with a website).
- UK residents represent less than 10% of my customers.
- I don't have a lot of stock. For some species I sometimes only have 1 of them available over the span of a few months.
- It would just cost too much to keep them alive in another country before selling them. Some of the plants I sell require very specific conditions and a lot of knowledge about them to keep them alive.
- It's totally out of the scale of what I'm doing, remember that this is a thread about one-person business. I do not want too many customers otherwise I will just run out of personal time (I'm doing all the packaging after work hours)
It's just really not worth it or even possible for me. If some UK resident really wants to buy a lot of plants from me, then I can request a phytosanitary certificate from the government (costs around 100€, and includes an inspection).
There's a lot of small businesses out there that just don't have enough market demand to be turned into something as large as what you're suggesting.
What would moving to a .com domain do? Help with SEO?