I was an early adopter of online shopping. When I Christmas shopped on the Internet for the first time, it was still new enough and messed up enough that I got $100 back from one toy purveyor because they were unprepared for so many Internet customers.
Same goes for garden catalogs. My first experience with seed catalog shopping on line was disastrous. The sites were hard to navigate and you couldn’t find anything easily. Then, when I had to call wondering where my order was, I was told that on-line orders actually take longer than if I’d sent it off at the post office.
That was years ago. I never touched another garden catalog web site, because I felt I just couldn’t risk it. You need your seeds and plants to get delivered on time. Nothing is so frustrating as a late order for things that need to be planted by a certain time.
Last year, though, it was my paper-and-pencil order that took forever. So this year, I decided to give on-line garden shopping another try.
And what a difference! I usually order from different catalogs each year, depending on what I need and price. This year I concentrated most of my ordering from R.H. Shumway.
This is a company whose paper catalog looks like it was mailed to you from the 1930s. It’s got gorgeous color illustrations of vegetables on the front cover suitable for decoupaging. Inside is plain paper stock that resembles newsprint, complete with old-timey font for the varieties. And line drawings of the veggies. In black and white. No photos anywhere. It practically screams Grampa!
But I’m telling you, they had the slickest, easiest to use web ordering site I’ve ever seen. Better than Amazon. Someone should get an award for it. Who would have guessed?
It’s easy and logical. Vegetable seeds are alphabetical. Then you choose what you want–beans, for example. Then you choose a sub category, bush beans for instance. And then up pops all the varieties of bush string beans.
That probably doesn’t seem like such a big deal until you try it on another catalog, like Park Seeds (where I also put in a smaller order of things Shumway didn’t have). At Park, the categories are bigger and you spend much more time just scrolling through the pictures.
Best of all, the Shumway site had a little box that totals your order as you go. It’s always visible. You don’t have to go off to another page or start the check-out process to keep track. And when you’re done, they give you a printout listing everything you ordered that’s easy to read and print.
One drawback to online ordering hasn’t changed, though. There’s still no button to click for “no substitutions.” Instead, a customer service rep advised me to write it in the box for gift messages, which I did at both Shumway and Park.
I called back the next day just to be sure they got the message. Shumway said it was noted. And Park?
“No substitutions comes up automatically on everything you order,” the customer service rep told me.
I guess all those years of frowny faces on the paper orders made an impression.
Posted by: Roxie
