How to sell plants online without killing them in transit

The propagation shelf has got out of hand, three people on Instagram have asked if you sell, and you've just discovered that a 12cm pot costs £5.20 to post tracked before you've bought a box.

Here's the shape of it. Sell in whichever season your plants can travel in, which is not the same season for houseplants as it is for garden plants. Post Monday to Wednesday only. Secure the pot, not the stem. Charge postage honestly rather than hiding it, build a replacement rate of around 5% into your prices, and publish a 48-hour arrival policy before your first parcel goes out rather than after your first one arrives frozen.

The whole business is a fight against time in a dark box, and almost every decision follows from that.

Never post a plant on a Thursday

This is the rule that experienced growers follow and beginners learn the expensive way.

A parcel posted on Thursday afternoon that misses Friday's delivery run sits in an unheated depot until Monday. That's three extra days in the dark, at whatever temperature the depot happens to be, with no water and no light. A hardy shrub shrugs. A calathea, a maranta or anything tropical arrives yellow, limp and sometimes dead.

So: dispatch Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Anything ordered after Wednesday morning goes out the following Monday, and you say so plainly on the product page. You'll lose the occasional impatient buyer and you'll save yourself far more in replacements. Setting that expectation clearly, rather than promising a speed you can't hold, is worked through in delivery times you can actually promise.

Bank holidays are the same problem with a friendlier name. Check the calendar at the start of each month and mark your last dispatch day before each one.

Your season depends on what you sell, and it inverts

Most guides talk about "the growing season" as though there's one. For a seller there are two calendars and they're almost opposites.

Tender houseplants and tropicals. These travel badly below about 5°C and badly again above about 28°C. In the UK, that leaves roughly April to October as a comfortable posting window, with heat packs stretching the shoulder weeks at either end. December to February is the risk period, and a cold snap in January will kill a parcel that would have been fine a fortnight earlier.

Hardy garden plants, shrubs, roses, fruit trees and hedging. These are the reverse. The best time to move them is when they're dormant and leafless, which is roughly November to March. Dormant plants can be sold bare root: no pot, no compost, no weight, wrapped roots in a bag. A bare-root rose costs a fraction of a potted one to post and establishes better. That's why the traditional nursery trade sells bare root all winter and stops in spring.

Cuttings, unrooted props and seeds. Cheapest and safest of the lot. A rooted cutting in damp moss, in a bag, in a padded envelope, is a letter-sized parcel. Low postage, low risk, and a good way to test whether anyone wants what you're growing before you pot up two hundred of anything.

The practical consequence: if you sell both houseplants and garden plants, you don't have a quiet season, you have two businesses that take turns. If you sell only tropicals, you have four months a year where the sensible thing is to stop shipping, sell locally, or sell only to buyers who accept the risk in writing.

What it costs to send one plant

Real numbers for a 12cm potted houseplant going tracked within the UK:

Line	Cost
The plant, grown on from a cutting	£1.80
12cm pot and peat-free compost	£0.65
Box, sized to the plant	£0.78
Newspaper, tissue, bag for the rootball, tape	£0.30
Heat pack, October to April	£1.20
Tracked 48 postage	£4.20
Total to get one plant to a door	£8.93

At a £14 selling price with £4.50 postage charged separately, you're taking £18.50 and spending £8.93, leaving £9.57 before your time and before losses. Take 5% off for replacements and you're at about £8.90 a plant.

That looks reasonable, and it is, until you realise the postage line is nearly half your cost and the plant itself is the cheapest thing in the box. This is why plant sellers who do well either sell higher-value specimens, where the postage is a small fraction, or sell in multiples, where one box carries three plants for one postage. A three-plant box at £38 with one £6 postage charge is a far better business than three separate £14 orders.

Charge postage separately and honestly rather than burying it in the price. Plant buyers are used to it and they're suspicious of "free delivery" on a heavy, fragile item. There's a fuller treatment of that decision in how to work out delivery charges.

Packing a living thing

The core principle: secure the pot, never the stem. Every damaged-in-transit photo you'll ever receive shows a snapped stem, and it snapped because the plant was held by its leaves while the pot rolled around the box.

The method that works for a potted plant:

1. Water lightly the day before, not the morning of. Sodden compost is heavy, it turns the box to mush, and it rots roots in a warm van. Slightly damp is right.
2. Put the pot inside a plastic bag and tape the bag around the top of the pot, around the stem base, so the compost stays in the pot.
3. Wrap the foliage loosely in a sheet of paper, twisted at the top like a bouquet. Loose, so leaves aren't crushed, but held so they can't flail.
4. Sit the pot in the box and pack tightly around the pot with scrunched paper until it cannot move at all. Shake the box. If anything shifts, add more.
5. Fill the space above the foliage lightly so the box doesn't crush inwards, but don't press on the leaves.
6. Tape it, mark it "Live plants, this way up", and mean it.

For bare root, it's simpler and more forgiving. Wrap the roots in damp newspaper or shredded paper, bag the roots, tie above the root collar, and pack the whole thing lying down. Bare root travels for days without complaint, which is precisely why the trade does it that way.

Heat packs go against the side of the box, never touching the foliage or the rootball directly, with paper between. They run for a fixed number of hours, so a heat pack on a parcel that gets delayed is worth nothing on day three. It buys you one cold night, not a week.

The general rules for parcels that survive bad handling are in packaging that survives the courier, and they all apply, plus the fact that yours is alive and on a clock.

Describe it so the plant that arrives is the plant they expected

Plant buyers have been disappointed a lot, and the disappointment is nearly always about size.

State four things, every listing:

• Pot size in centimetres. 9cm, 12cm, 17cm. This is what the trade uses and what buyers understand.
• Total height, and whether that includes the pot. Say which. "About 30cm tall including the 12cm pot" leaves no argument.
• Whether the photo is the exact plant or representative. For a one-off specimen, photograph the actual plant and say so. For a batch of twenty seedlings, say "photo is representative, yours will be a similar size" and mean it.
• Light and water needs, in one line each. Not a care essay. "Bright indirect light, water when the top 2cm is dry."

Then include a small care card in the box repeating it. A plant that dies in week three because someone put it in a south-facing window generates a bad review that isn't about your packing at all.

Every plant you post is a photograph the buyer has already fallen in love with. Your job is to make the plant that comes out of the box the same plant.

Pests, and the parcel you should not send

Inspect every plant the day before it goes out. Turn the leaves over. Look at the leaf axils and the undersides of new growth for thrips, spider mite webbing, mealybug, scale and fungus gnats in the compost.

Then don't send it if you find anything. Not "give it a wipe and send it". A single infested plant introduced into someone's collection is the sort of thing that gets written about publicly, and rightly. Quarantine new stock you buy in for at least three weeks before it goes anywhere near your sales shelf.

There's a rule side to this too, and it varies by country and by what you're selling. Moving plants commercially, and especially moving them across a border, frequently requires plant health documentation that a hobby seller has never heard of. Check with your national plant health authority what applies to a small trader before you list anything for international delivery, because the penalties and the parcel seizures are real. Domestic-only sales are usually far simpler, but "usually" isn't good enough to plan on. Ring them and ask.

The arrival policy, published before you need it

Some parcels arrive badly. Publish what happens then, in four lines, on the shop page:

1. Check your plant within 48 hours of delivery.
2. If there's a problem, send photos of the plant and of the box and packing, before you unpot anything.
3. Damaged in transit or dead on arrival: replacement on the next dispatch day, or a refund, your choice.
4. After 48 hours, or if a plant declines over the following weeks, message me and I'll help with care, but I can't replace it.

That last line is the one that matters and the one most sellers are too nervous to write. A plant that arrives healthy and dies six weeks later in a dark bathroom is not your fault, and saying so up front is far easier than saying it in the moment. Buyers accept it because it's obviously fair.

Ask for the box photo specifically. It tells you whether the courier crushed it, which changes what you claim and how you pack the next one. If a parcel goes missing entirely rather than arriving damaged, the claims process is its own headache and it's covered in what to do when a parcel goes missing.

Worked example: Rosie, houseplants from a spare room, Sheffield

Rosie grows on cuttings and small imports, and sells about 60 plants a month between April and October. Average order is two plants at £14 each plus £4.95 postage, so £32.95.

Per two-plant order her costs run to roughly £3.60 for the plants, £1.30 pots and compost, £1.10 box and packing, £5.90 postage for the larger box. About £11.90. She's clearing around £21 an order before her time, and she spends about six hours a week potting, packing and answering messages.

November to March she stops posting tropicals entirely. Instead she sells rooted cuttings in padded envelopes at £6 each, which travel fine in cold weather because they're small, insulated by the packaging and cheap enough to replace, and she does two indoor plant fairs in December. Winter revenue is about a third of summer revenue and she plans for it rather than panicking about it.

Her loss rate ran at 11% in her first autumn because she was still posting on Thursdays. It's under 3% now. That single scheduling change was worth more than every packing improvement she made.

She takes payment by bank transfer and card. The transfers cost her nothing on Sailo, since it never touches the money on that rail, and the card orders cost 1–3% of the goods, which is 14c on a £28 order, on top of the Business plan at $49 a month. At 60 orders a month that subscription is under 2% of revenue. She'd have been better off on transfers alone in her first three months, and she knows it.

The honest limitation

Nothing in a shop platform knows the weather. Sailo can't watch the forecast and stop selling tropicals when Tuesday night is going to be minus two. There's no dispatch-window rule, no seasonal auto-pause, no temperature hold. When the cold snap comes you set the affected products unavailable yourself, and you put a line at the top of your shop saying why and when you'll be back.

Which is fine, and it takes ninety seconds, but it's a habit rather than a feature, and the week you forget is the week you find out. Put a recurring Sunday-evening reminder in your phone from October to March: check the week's overnight lows, pause or post.

What to do next

Look at what you actually have enough of to sell ten of. Not your rarest plant, the one on the shelf you keep giving away. That's your first listing.

Pack one as though you were posting it, and post it to yourself or to a friend two counties away, tracked, on a Monday. Open it as a customer would. Whatever's wrong when you open that box is what would have been wrong on your first real order, and it costs you £5 to find out instead of a refund and a review.

Then write your dispatch days and your 48-hour arrival policy into your shop page, and set your first cold-weather pause date in the calendar now, while it's still warm and you're not thinking about it.