Chief Landscape Designer, Ryan Domnick, co-owns Low Maintenance Landscape with his business partner and designer, Brenda Scaman. As their landscape architect business grew, many local customers started requesting to purchase native plants not found in other competitor nurseries. Therefore, creating an opportunity to provide a new storefront plant nursery open to the public called Kansas Plant Farm.

How did DWD identify a solution?

Dallas Web Developers was tasked to build an e-commerce website that could catalog entire inventory of plants and gardening products into an online presence called KansasPlantFarm .com. 

In order to build a robust e-commerce platform from scratch, the DWD team had concluded with the following the must have features:

Appointment Scheduler

Since the city of Lawrence limited the number of customers that could arrive at a time due to its residential location, an appointment manager was needed for scheduling pick ups of online orders. Ryan wanted a scheduler that allowed him to enter his availabilty by days with 30 min time slots. Once a customer picked a time slot, the time slot was removed and opened availability if the customer cancelled via email link.

Inventory Management

To save time, Ryan wanted to upload his entire plant inventory using a CSV file. With over 1300 products in inventory, he wanted to divide it up into Active, Inactive, and Retired. In addition, he wanted to track 3 types of pot sizes, regular price & discount price, and quantity for each pot sizes. Each plant also had meta data such as type of garden category, latin & common name, flower, foliage, tolerances, cultural condition, zone, growth, maintenance and other limitation.

Advanced Search and Filter

Search is used to quickly query a product. And in e-commerce, speed matters. Ryan wanted a search tool to make queries by keyword on every latin and common name. In addition, he wanted it to be fast. Using an SQL database, DWD was able to optimize and reduce cache usage on every search query.

Advanced filter required more critical thinking as Ryan wanted to give users the option to do a partial match and exact match search. For the average user, partial match gave a wider variety of selection. But for a hardcore gardener, exact match was needed to balance out their garden ecosystem. These type of users can filter by:

• Latin Name (Alphabetically)
• Plant Type
• Garden Category
• Plant Zone
• Cultural Conditions
• Flower and Foliage
• Plant Tolerances
• Growth and Maintenance
• Plant Uses

Wishlist an Item

Since gardeners start planning in early spring, Ryan needed for them to create an account and save any plant item into a bucketlist. Since 2021, gardeners had found this useful as it replaced their notetaking process.

Fast Checkout

As far as checkout, Ryan wanted the checkout process to be quick and easy. Users can checkout as a guest or with an account. He also allowed users to provide a secondary pickup person incase they are unable to be present. All checkouts have a small questionnaire form to let employees know of what to do if the plant is not available.

Printable Invoice

With an admin checkout dashboard, Ryan wanted his employees to pull up online orders and print out an invoice for paid customers. The invoice can also be download and sent as a PDF file.

How Kansas Plant Farm impacted the Gardener Community

Since it’s inception in 2020, Kansas Plant Farm has given more life to a homeowner. Plants have amazing health benefits and without it, human couldn’t actually survive. Plants not only bring more oxgyen, but also reduces stress. Kansas Plant Farm’s mission is to give back more life to your home. As of today, it has grown 20% year-after-year and is projected to be Lawrences, Kansas’s number #1 gardener’s plant resource.