Trend of online shopping is of the emerging change in the nature of shopping era. Everyone try to avoid heavy traffic and visiting shop. Online shopping provides the facility of purchasing goods while sitting in a room having cool and pleasant environment. Now shopping is easy just as 1.2.3, search and select your desire product, order product and finally pay amount on delivery.
Now every national and multinational company in Pakistan start online store in parallel to physical shop. J.is one of the emerging clothing brand in Pakistan and across Pakistan J. stores are located but now you can buy your favorite product online using J. online shop. Similarly all trending brands including clothing, electronics, household, fruits, vegetables, meat etc started online store and the future shopping 50% shifted to online shopping. Every company focus on future shopping trends, android mobile penetration in Pakistan’s society faster this process of revolution and I hope coming era is completely shifted to online.
Agriculture and Gardening is one of the basic sector of Pakistan, modern online trending tsunami also affects the agriculture sector. Now you can easily purchased agriculture products easy as never before this era. Many agriculture companies launched online stores and you can order products from anywhere from Pakistan. But still field agriculture sector depends on local dealer because there requirement is more in term of weight. Farmers required many Kilograms of fertilizers and many kg of seeds for thousands of acres. The main hurdle in agriculture online selling is shipping cost. In Pakistan, online order shipping mainly depends on private courier companies like Leopards, TCS, MN&P etc while there rates are very high as compare to Pakistan Post. Pakistan Post is cheaper as compare to private courier companies but customers not trust on Pakistan Post services. The standard of Pakistan post is very low in term of delivery time. In case of private courier leopard is cheaper as compare to TCS but quality standard of leopard is also very sub-standards and return rate is very high in case of using Leopards courier.
Gardeners are self producing or commercial small farmers that grow vegetables, herbs and flowers for self use or for business purpose. The production area is very smaller as compare to field cultivated farmers having large cultivated area with large input required. Gardener input requirements are less and can easily buy fertilizers, compost, seeds, pots and other input from online gardening/agriculture shop. If a gardener go to local shop for 1 or 3 kg compost for pots it will spend fare to go on shop and also time but he pay Rs 99 to Rs 145 shipping cost for online purchase which is less as compare to physical purchase, so he/she prefer to purchase online rather than visit a gardening shop. Shipping cost is again hurdle for gardening input, in case of Rs. 99 of product the shipping cost is Rs. 99 to Rs 145 or sometime more at the final shipping cost become greater than product cost that restrict customers to buy product from online stores.
The only solution of success of online gardening and agriculture input is decrease shipping cost that will only possible after joint venture of courier companies and online gardening stores. The courier companies are main players that decide the future of online gardening/agriculture business in Pakistan, customers are willing to buy gardening products online but shipping is the only hurdle to restrict them to fully utilize the benefits of online shopping.
