Mesa Garden sells cactus and succulent plants from their nursery in New Mexico, supplying tens of thousands of rare seeds to customers around the world. Starting with our free FileMaker template, FM QuickStart, we built them a custom FileMaker application to manage their customers, products and invoices, but Mesa Garden still lacked a modern website. Every order was made via email and entered by hand into their FileMaker application. By the time they were able to process an order, products may have sold out or the shipping address had changed. We worked with Mesa Garden to build an e-commerce website using WooCommerce that allows customers to place orders online in real-time and automatically syncs to their FileMaker application.

The Challenge

Processing orders manually was literally a full-time job for one of the owners and limited Mesa Garden’s ability to grow and adapt as a business. They needed a way for customers to submit automatically validated information and to order only products that were actually available.

The Solution

We built a modern e-commerce website powered by WooCommerce that allows Mesa Garden’s customers to place orders online. Those orders are then synced automatically to their FileMaker application with all the information validated so that orders can be processed in a timely manner. Because inventory is now tracked online, customers are unable to order products out of stock and Mesa Garden knows ahead of time if they are going to sell out of a product. Mesa Garden can also use their FileMaker application to add, update or remove any of their thousands of products to the website with the click of a button, and customers can update their information directly on the website.

The Results

With the new website, Mesa Garden is able to process orders more than 5 times as quickly as they could before, allowing the owners to focus on growing the business instead of wasting time on manual data entry. In fact, for the first time in 40 years, Mesa Garden is able to get real-time feedback on their pricing, allowing them more accurately understand the value of their rare seeds. The modern look and feel of the new website also opens the door to attracting new customers and, with stock management in place, customers are no longer ordering unavailable products and expecting them to arrive.