How GardenTap Delivers Plants Across Ontario and Beyond
GardenTap’s Richard Dilda explains how this Ontario-based online nursery uses Routific to turn its Shopify orders into delivery route plans.
- GardenTap is an online nursery with a mission: it sells plants across Ontario and aims to get good plants, and the knowledge to grow them, to people whose local garden centers have closed.
- They have three ways to fulfill orders: direct delivery across southern Ontario using their own trucks, couriers for long-distance shipping to the rest of Canada, and customer pickup from their depot.
- They use Routific's Shopify integration to build delivery routes through the week.
- Pickup is growing fast: depots around southern Ontario are planned, and eventually a physical store.
GardenTap is on a mission to help Canadians improve their homes and communities through gardening — and they ship plants throughout Ontario, and as far away as British Columbia and New Brunswick, to make it happen.
Operations Manager Richard Dilda says the company was founded to counteract the loss of access to plants and plant knowledge as older garden centers have closed down and big-box stores have moved in to replace them: “With box stores taking over, we're losing a sense of the value plants bring, and the education behind it. People are being sold plants that aren’t hardy for their area. Then they plant them and they’re dying. We’re trying to promote a deeper understanding of growing and gardening.”
Based in Hamilton, Ontario, GardenTap sells perennials, trees, shrubs, evergreens, grasses and fruit online. They also answer plant questions in chat all day and publish planting guides, aiming to serve everyone from the expert gardener hunting one specific rose to the new homeowner who doesn't know their zone.
Their biggest demand comes from exactly the urban areas that are losing garden centers, in cities like Toronto, Ottawa, London, Kitchener, and even Montreal.
They deliver across southern Ontario in their own trucks, ship to the rest of Canada by courier, and offer a pickup service for customers who can visit in person.
Delivery planning, from Shopify storefront to suburban backyard
Once orders are received in Shopify, those for local delivery are sent straight to Routific for route planning. “The feature for adding orders directly from Shopify is very helpful,” Dilda says. “It saves time.”
From there, Dilda keeps adding new orders and adjusting route plans as the week progresses. One of the challenges is the variable size of loads: GardenTap sells everything from plugs to 10-foot trees, so “a truck could be one order, or 25 orders,” Dilda says. He builds routes based on driver availability, load size, and destination — he knows a run through Toronto traffic will take much longer than a rural route.
“Routific is a very important tool for us to visualize our routes and manually control what we want to do,” Dilda says.
The day before delivery he exports the route so truck loading can be optimized for the planned delivery order. “If we have 20 orders, stop 1 needs to be at the end of the truck and 20 on the inside,” Dilda says. “So we need to know that route order even ahead of time, as we're loading.”
What would the operation look like without routing software? “I’d be spending a lot of time with Google Maps,” Dilda says.
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The challenges of third-party plant delivery
Local delivery, Dilda says, is the easy part — it’s handing over plants to third-party courier companies that’s hard.
“Delivery is easy because we're caring for the plants until we deliver them to the customer,” he says. With complete control over the whole delivery process, “we know a plant is healthy when we deliver it.”
With couriers, there are no guarantees. GardenTap has learned some tricks: don’t ship during the heat of summer, and ship early in the week so plants don’t sit unattended in a warehouse over a weekend.
Working out accurate shipping costs is another challenge. “Plants aren’t like widgets, they grow,” Dilda says. “If it grew another foot between the time the order was placed and the time we ship it, we need a different box and it costs us more. That’s hard to know upfront.”
Moving from online to brick and mortar
Demand for the pickup service is growing, and GardenTap is considering making it more widely available.
“We have partners throughout the region, like smaller garden centers or growers, and we already have frequent deliveries, so we want depots throughout southern Ontario where people can actually come and see their plants and pick them up,” says Dilda. “We're reversing the trend — online first, maybe brick and mortar second.”
Visit GardenTap to learn more.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Shopify orders be sent to route planning software?
Yes. Routific's Shopify integration imports your orders into a route plan, and you choose which ones to bring in, so pickup and courier orders stay out of your local delivery routes.
How do you plan delivery routes when order sizes vary wildly?
Weight and volume rules break down when one stop is a single plant and the next is twenty trees. Businesses in this position plan visually instead: group stops on a map, let the software sequence them, then adjust by hand against driver hours and known traffic.
Why does route order matter for loading a truck?
The first stop has to come off the truck first. Knowing the optimized sequence before loading means the vehicle gets packed in reverse stop order, so drivers aren't climbing over later deliveries to reach the first one.
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