From Latin Name to a Complete Shopify Plant Store

Adding plants to a webshop sounds easy. Until you actually have to do it. A supplier sends you an Excel file with 800 plant names. Some products already exist in your Shopify store, others don’t. Descriptions are missing, photos come from different sources and half of the products have little more than a price and a Latin name. Sounds familiar?

We've been through this process hundreds of times since 2002 and know it's a hassle, so that's why we launched Open Plant Data. One source of plant data & information, directly integrated with your Shopify webshop via our plugin.

Start with the Latin name

The integration uses the botanical name of a plant to automatically match Shopify products with a matching record in Open Plant Data. We don't simply match exact names, but also check for synonyms, do a fuzzy search and apply tricks to overcome all the different Latin names of plants.

Already have your products in Shopify? We can enrich them with plant information, descriptions, characteristics and photos.

Starting from scratch? You can also use Open Plant Data to add an entire plant assortment to Shopify in one go.

No copying descriptions one by one. No searching for photos for every individual cultivar. And no manually matching hundreds or thousands of plants via an Excel file.

Getting started: as simple as it sounds!

Within the Open Plant Data platform, you simply click on "Connect with Shopify". This opens the Shopify plugin:

Install this plugin on your Shopify shop. Once done, you can see the field mapping between Open Plant Data and Shopify:

You can link existing metafields or use existing ones, and link them to the data we provide. This means the field "Family" on the Open Plant Data platform can be linked to for example your field "Plant family". You can also opt to ignore fields and data we provide. 

Once the fields are set up, you can simply push a list of products to your shop:

Depending on the number of plants, this might take a few minutes. The only thing you need to do on your Shopify platform is check your details and activate the product. Once done, you're ready to sell!

Keep your plant webshop up to date

The other problem with plant data is maintenance: information changes, better photos become available and data gets improved over time. With the Shopify integration, these updates can automatically flow through to your store.

Your Shopify plant webshop therefore doesn’t become another database that needs constant manual maintenance but it's simply always up to date.

Sell more than the plants you have today

For us, that is probably the biggest advantage. Many garden centers and plant retailers only put a small part of their plant assortment online because maintaining hundreds or thousands of product pages takes too much time.

With Open Plant Data, you can build a much more complete online assortment.

Houseplants, perennials, shrubs, trees, grasses and other garden plants can all be managed through the same system. And because our plant data is available in multiple languages, you can use the same catalog for different markets, including American English, British English, German, French and more.

Included with Open Plant Data

The Shopify integration is included with our Copper, Silver and Gold services. You can check full pricing here.

Copper is designed for smaller assortments of up to 1,000 plants, while Silver and Gold are suitable for businesses working with larger plant catalogs.

If you already use Shopify for selling plants, there’s a good chance most of the hard work is already done. We just need the Latin names.

And, good to know, if you're not on Shopify, you can use similar integrations with WooCommerce, Wix, Magento or any other system via our API.