Nurseries: Include your postal mailing address on every page of your Web site. At the worst, provide the link to a “Contact Us” page that has this information on every page of your Web site.
I value local sources of plants for several reasons:
- Reduced shipping costs: It costs less to ship something to me from New England than California or Oregon, so it costs less for me to get a plant from local sources. Fuel and transportation costs will continue to increase, so this will become increasingly important.
- Greater viability: It takes less time to ship something locally than across country, so the plants I receive from local sources are in better condition.
- Suitability: Plants propagated and grown out locally are more likely to already be accustomed to my climate.
- Selections: Small, local nurseries are more likely to have small quantities of specialty plants unavailable elsewhere.
- Economics: It’s more sustainable economically and culturally to support local business when and where I can.
Finding out where you are located should not become a treasure hunt. Case in point: Perennial Express, located (I eventually discovered) on Long Island.
Their home page contains no contact information. There’s also no obvious link to such information, such as the usual “”Contact Us” or equivalent. It now becomes a “treasure hunt”: keep clicking on every available link until you happen to stumble across one that looks like it might lead you to the information you want.
Neither of the links at the bottom of the page – Terms & Conditions, and Shipping Information – provide any information.
Their Catalog page (referred to elsewhere on their site as their “Online Store” – two different ideas, in my mind) tantalizingly, teasingly, provides a “Contact Us” link. However, that link leads to an online form which you can fill out to send a site-generated email. Again, no information about where they might be located.
In fact, nowhere on this site is there any information about how to contact them or where they might be located. Not even the state or area of the country is given anywhere. The only way to find out where they are is to leave their site.
Turns out they have a wholesale operation called The Plantage. There is one link to that buried at the end of their home page. Again, however, there is no obvious link to their contact information, even on their wholesale site.
There are five “fake” links across the top of the home page: Home, Sales, Information, Links, Gardening. “Fake” because they don’t link to anything. They’re just anchors for drop-down menus of links which only appear when you move your mouse over them.
Through this kind of “out of frustration I wave my mouse around the screen just to see what happens” exploration, I eventually discovered that there is a “Contact Us” link hidden beneath the “Information” anchor. There I found just what I was looking for: mailing addresses, with zip codes and everything.
For anyone who cares at this point, they’re located in Mattituck and Cutchogue in far Eastern Long Island, near Orient Point, about 85 miles from where I live. That qualifies as a local source for me. But based on my frustrating experience trying to figure that out, I’m not going turn to them unless and until they can straighten our their retail end of things.
