Cherrylake Curbside was created in 2021 to meet the needs of smaller landscape professionals who struggle to meet the minimum order requirements of our wholesale operation. Customers can purchase directly from Cherrylake online and pick up curbside in as little as two hours from the time of purchase. This allows Cherrylake to sell to a new demographic of customers without the need for additional sales and accounting support. Designed as a quick turnaround solution, the same-day pickup structure allows local landscape professionals to access plant material just-in-time with fewer of the logistical considerations necessary in the traditional wholesale channel.

The Curbside website was built on the BigCommerce platform which is designed to integrate natively with our ERP system. While Curbside was built with small business in mind, it is also an excellent test case to open our doors to a wider retail business. This system could also provide a future online ordering experience for our wholesale customers, allowing them to make purchases and provide payment through a parallel B2B ecommerce channel.

Our Marketing, Outsourcing, Logistics, and IT teams have collaborated to face the challenges of creating an optimized user experience while enabling a full stack of data integrations between the e-commerce front end and our back office accounting system. We onboarded a Business Development Manager at the end of FY22 to usher in new customers.

While it took a while to get Curbside off the ground, we have been seeing this venture take many strides in recent months with a steady increase in both daily order volumes and monthly revenue.

In Curbside V2, we will explore opening our services to retail customers, providing a much larger user base. We are integrating a pickup scheduling application that will allow customers to select a date and time of their order pickup. This will also provide information to our internal teams to plan for smooth and expedient customer transactions. The Curbside pickup area will be seeing new improvements in Spring of 2023, including a manned pickup window to greet arriving customers. Future marketing implementations include email drip campaigns, abandoned cart notifications, SMS text messaging and order follow-up surveys. With analytics and reporting on user interactions as well as direct feedback from customers, we can continue to improve the user experience and provide an interface that is simple, scalable and profitable.