The retail online nursery industry has imploded

It is not hard to reach millions on dollars of bad merchandise or returns if you are the size of Amazon. You can look at it from the other side as a business and say if they gave everything away like that there would be no reason to buy it. As they say the poor are easily departed with their money. For some that is the reason they are poor.

Part of the planned ā€˜great resetā€™ā€¦let the Amazons get bigger and put those stubborn independent little businessmen out of business.

Agree on your point, Steve.

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My father worked at a Petsmart warehouse before he passed away. Once a year they let employees have at all of the older / discontinued / returned items for free. He said it was everything from small pet toys up to custom aquariums that were even over 100 gallons. Only thing was if you got caught reselling you would be terminated. Anything not claimed went to the landfilll.

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ā€¦ so you have to imagine what would happen if they did discount distressed merchandise. Competitors would swoop in and buy it below wholesale. As a competitor, I used to pay below wholesale for returned computers from a local store of a world-wide discount retailer. Often the computers were returned for remorse, not because there was anything really wrong with them. It worked for me up to the point that the store started to have to return their merchandise back through their own distribution channel to get retail credit, and I couldnā€™t pay retail.

ā€¦ so a corporate decision to recoup the last shred of value from distressed inventory put me out of business.

From a macro-economic point of view, it makes sense to keep the goods in circulation rather than scrapping them out. Society would benefit from more goods. The ecology would benefit from less waste. The economic pie would be larger.

This is why gleaning is allowed.

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This is why excess food is donated to food banks before it spoils.

Moreover consumers who couldnā€™t pay full-price for supported, up-to-date goods would still have early access to cut-rate products and develop an appetite for paying more for better in the future.

However, corporate accountants look at the world as a zero-sum game. Missed opportunities are counted against current sales, and whatever they donā€™t take away from the competition over the next fiscal year is seen as lost forever.

Itā€™s a mercenary attitude that makes the world a poorer place.

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Of all the things Iā€™ve learned in the last few years getting into reading /listening to self improvement books, one thing that has stuck out to me is the concept that my success does not have to impede upon anotherā€™s success. We can all improve and succeed together because there is not a shortage of success to be had. To bring it back to the topic on hand, maybe an example where this doesnā€™t apply is the tulip craze, but you get what I mean.

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I agree but your success does put pressure on others to succeed. While that may motivate you and I to innovate and improve, I have observed that it motivates others to whine and complain.

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There are a few challenges with success vs another personā€™s success. That tree someone bought at your competitor is a tree you cannot sell. Kind of like a promotion in the work place. A position opens up and if you do not get it but your friend that is a coworker gets the position you wanted there is still going to be some animosity towards whoever got it. Same goes for the sales. That being said more often than not prices go hand on hand. Last year prices were raised across the board on all online nurseries. I will be interested if the same happens this year. Raintree nursery will be the first major nursery to open itā€™s doors and if Raintree has raised prices again you can count on other nurseries raising them this year too. Part of it may be that the actual price of sale went up but there are laws put in place, Some laws state you canā€™t sell too high above competitors but other laws say you canā€™t sale below competitors by too low of margins. I think there was a news story on gas prices recently where a gas company sued another gas company because they were keeping prices lower than the other company.

This is the fallacy of ā€œopportunity cost:ā€ That lost sales are actually a loss. In fact, you donā€™t have to pay the unit costs associated with preparing, storing, handling, and shipping the product. If your competitor has lower unit margins, his fixed costs may swamp his profit, leaving you better off for losing the sale.

Costs are tangible things, but opportunity is not. There are other intangibles. For example, competition stimulates market health, which may benefit all market participants to some extent.

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Can anyone do a deeper dive into this nursery? I think its a scamā€¦ like a full on scamā€¦but an amazing amount of work must have went into this. Theres at least 10 things from them i wantā€¦

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Looks interestingā€¦

Nice selection of perennials including some that are quite rare in North America.

Descriptions of many include things like ā€œquite rare in the UKā€

Prices are excellent.

iā€™m also suspicious, but PayPal is an option and that usually provides some protection.

Also I found that there is an English company who uses a very similar logo. The contact us address is in Louisville, GA.

Scott

I have gotten scammed on Ebay while using PayPal. It is not as useful as you would hope. Generally good websites use it but if you try to use their warranty you end up waiting a half a month or more for your money back. It is also up to you to provide the evidence and provide it against what the seller claims. In my case the seller sent a package that just had a note stating thank you for buying from us. When I claimed I never got the item the seller sent a tracking number stating it was delivered so they put it in their favor. I then altered my claim to a not as described claim which took another two weeks for a decision which PayPal sided with me. I took a picture of the package which was too thin, stated out they used a first class package and how the item was over the weight a first class package and they saw the tracking number they provided was clearly on the package. A credit card theft protection would not normally have me provide all of that and I can see many people not keeping or knowing what I kept and knew.

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Heres where i am with itā€¦

Their address-
1156 Simpson Square
LOUISVILLE GA 30434

Google maps takes me to Jefferson hospital. Im not good at google maps so perhaps im doing it wrong.

on the FAQ page it asks if they take cheques. they reply that they do not take cheques.

on the Delivery tab it says that you can email them admin@batgearshop.com

if you put that in a search engine you will come up with this site
https://www.crucian-goldshop.com/faq/ which has the exact same layout for a website. They are located in Los Angeles CAā€¦

That same email is linked to bigbagsale.com which also has the exact same layout for a website and is located in VT.

that same email is linked to https://www.romanceshops.com/contact-us/ which is located in CO.

it was linked to batgearshop which sold sports stuffā€¦but i think it was shut down.

also linked to https://www.buddha-jeweshop.com/ same website and same info located in NC.

So everything screams scamā€¦to me.

Any way to prove it? Is paypal safe to use if its a scam?

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As I mentioned PayPal will protect you but it asks you to provide the evidence and the seller to provide their evidence and based on the evidence they decide kind of like a court setting.

I did a mock order and there is no option for paypal. The icons at the bottom are dead and only for looksā€¦not sure if that is even legal. Adding something to the cart the measurements are in centimeters and liters.

So im guessing that the main location is overseas and would be nearly impossible to get a refund unless you did it within 30 days or so on your own end.

Of course the nursery would state that they ship in the spring which would go past the date of a chargeback.

To get a refund from themā€¦you have to ship the item back to them on your dime it states.

I ran into this before with another nursery they shipped me dead plants but the time involved to receive them was way way past the date of a chargebackā€¦so its a great scam.

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Their prices are extremely low too which is not a good sign. The two times I had issues on Ebay was when I found an item for an extreme good deal and they either had no reviews or had 2 good reviews but those were the only reviews I could find. I have just learned that with places with low prices either you are being scammed or you pay with it in some other way. I have gotten cheap plants but when you buy cheap plants that was not a scam you tend to pay with your time it takes for that plant to grow. I still remember how a member here found a cheap plant on Etsy and it came as a twig grafted onto a rootstock.

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Donā€™t be overly reassured by Paypal. I once bought three shirts and a pair of pants from an online retailer that was new to me. They took forever to ship, and then when they did only sent me one shirt and the pants. I had ordered them because they were supposed to be linen, but what they sent was made from synthetic material. I opened a paypal claim, but somehow didnā€™t realize they were expecting me to return ship the two sent items at my own cost before approving the claim so they closed the claim in the companies favor and I never got my money back or the rest of the shirts.

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Haha read the About Us section. ā€œClothing industryā€ā€¦

Truer words have never been spoken -
ā€œ1% of anything is more than 100% of nothingā€

I have a pretty long list of people who created unique plants who refused to sell or share germplasm with others who could have helped them test their plant(s) under different growing conditions and could have helped them popularize the plant. But they refused because they all fantasized, with absolutely no evidence to support that fantasy, that if they patented the plant they would become rich. In every case the plant was never sold commercially and eventually disappeared, and the creator never accomplished anything of benefit to the plant world.

One instance involved a seedling chestnut tree that the grower refused to let anyone else try to grow. Twenty years after he originated the tree he was contacting people to see if anyone had it because he had somehow lost it. No one had it because he never gave it to anyone.

Another instance involved a prunus hybridizer who thought he would compete with Zaiger. He developed a couple of decent hybrids that had good fruit (I have tasted the fruit), and even a unique taste that some growers might have liked, but nothing as good as Zaigerā€™s best. He refused to share wood and still doesnā€™t have patents. If he had just popularized his trees by giving wood to growers he would have gained some small amount of credit which could have helped him raise money and raised other growersā€™ awareness of his efforts. Instead he continues to accomplish nothing to benefit himself or the public.

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I would never buy any plants from any unknown sources in Georgia. Some of those unknown sources are just TyTy, the infamous Georgia nursery, operating under other names to escape their own notoriety.

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Iā€™m late getting in on this discussion, but Iā€™ve seen a few things that are encouraging. There are a few permaculture based online nurseries like Edible Acres, Twisted Tree, and others that sell most everything they have every season. These nurseries are small. Theyā€™re just making a living doing what they love, not getting rich. But they will show the processes they use for propagation and encourage people to save money by propagating their own plants. They even lay out step by step how they started and how others can get started selling some plants locally with the option to grow and expand into selling online over time. They encourage people to compete with them because they know that they canā€™t meet the demand.

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