Shopify and garden centre
A garden centre whose questions are mostly not about the shop
Almost nobody typing a question at a garden centre is trying to buy something online. They are planning a drive: whether you are open, whether the dog can come, whether the cafe is doing food, whether you deliver a tonne bag to their postcode. A Shopify store is built to answer none of that, and the material that would answer it is either on an older site somewhere else or sitting in your shipping settings where no page can see it.
Why this pairing is its own job
The Shopify install guide covers the tag, and the garden centre guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- The shop is a fraction of the business and the visitor is standing in a car park somewhere else. Opening hours by season, dog policy, the cafe, parking on a spring weekend, whether the paths are step free. On Shopify those live in Pages if they live anywhere, and frequently they live on a separate older site at another address entirely.
- Delivery rules for compost, aggregate and anything heavy are shipping zones, and a shipping zone is configuration. A rate table in the admin appears on no page, so the assistant cannot read it, and neither can the customer who is trying to work out whether you come to their village.
- Everything a garden centre knows is seasonal, and a crawl is a snapshot. Material captured in March answers a November question in March's voice, and the answer is not slightly stale, it is an instruction to do something that will fail.
- The safety question arrives through the shop. A product page for lilies carries cheerful supplier copy, and a visitor asking whether it is safe for cats is asking a question that page appears to be about.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the Shopify guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a garden centre site specifically.
Work out which site is the one to install on
The common shape here is a Shopify store on one address and the real site, the one with the hours and the cafe menu and the events, on another, built years earlier by somebody else. Visitors do not know or care which is which, and search sends them to whichever page matched.
Both need the tag, and both origins need listing, or the assistant exists on half of your presence. If the older site is somewhere you cannot add a script, that is worth knowing on day one, because it changes which half of the business this can help.
One assistant across both is usually right for a garden centre, because a visitor asking about compost delivery and a visitor asking about the cafe are frequently the same person on the same trip.
Write the delivery rules out as words before you crawl
Postcode zones, minimum orders for bulk goods, the charge, whether the driver goes past the kerb, and what you do with living stock in a heatwave or a frost. All of it exists in your head and in the shipping settings, and none of it exists as a sentence anybody can read.
This is the fastest content win on the list, because it is a page you can write in twenty minutes and it answers a question that otherwise takes a phone call each time. It also stops the assistant guessing from a shipping policy written for parcels, which is what it will otherwise reach for.
Plan the recrawl around the seasons rather than the calendar
The moments that matter are the ones where what you sell changes: bare root going on sale, bedding arriving, the Christmas switch, the first frost. Those are the boundaries where indexed material stops being true, and they do not fall on the first of the month.
Put the recrawl in the same list as the seasonal changeover you already run on the site. If the pages move and the index does not, the assistant carries on cheerfully recommending a job that is now two months out of date.
Where the answerable material lives
| A visiting page, written for somebody about to drive over | Hours by season including the ones that change, whether dogs are welcome and where, the cafe and its hours, parking and how it behaves on a bank holiday, step free routes, accessible toilets, and where the trolleys are. This is the single highest volume question set a garden centre gets and it is usually spread across four pages or none. |
|---|---|
| The seasonal calendar as dated posts | What is worth doing this month and what you have in, published on the store blog where each entry has its own address and its own date. Writing the month into the text matters, because it lets an answer carry its own timing when somebody reads it out of season. |
| Bulk and living goods delivery terms | Your zones as place names rather than as a rate table, minimum orders, what the driver will and will not do, and what happens to plants in transit in bad weather. Living stock is a different promise from a parcel and should be written as one. |
| The plant guarantee with its real exclusions | How long it runs, what proof you want, and the honest exclusions around planting conditions, drought and neglect. Generous in the headline and conditional in the detail, which is why the detail needs to be in the same document rather than on a poster at the till. |
The first thing to get right
Publish one visiting page covering hours, dogs, the cafe, parking and step free access, and link it from the shop's footer.
It answers more incoming questions than the entire product catalogue, it is true for months at a time, and it is the thing your website is worst at today. It also gives the assistant somewhere strong to land for the questions that arrive at nine in the evening from somebody deciding where to go tomorrow.
The failure that belongs to this combination
The supplier's plant description answers a toxicity question
Product pages on a garden centre store are usually imported from a nursery feed, and that copy is written to sell a plant. A visitor types whether something is safe for cats, and the closest matching material on the whole site is the page for that plant, which is warm, confident and silent on the subject.
The person asking has almost always asked too late. An animal has already chewed something, and what they need in the first reply is a vet and the poisons service, not a care sheet with a citation on it.
Handle it in the fallback wording rather than hoping the material behaves. Say plainly that you cannot advise on this, name the route to a vet in the same sentence, and set the threshold so a weak match refuses. Then add your own safety document so the topic is recognised rather than merely missed.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a garden centre visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- Our main site is not on Shopify. Where does the tag go?
- On both, with both origins listed. Visitors do not distinguish between the shop and the site, and search will land them on either. If the older site is somewhere you cannot add a script, decide deliberately which half of your traffic this covers rather than assuming it covers everything.
- Can it tell somebody the cafe is open on a bank holiday?
- Only if you wrote it down, and only if the page was crawled after you wrote it. One off closures and holiday hours are the case where the snapshot matters most, so treat editing the visiting page and recrawling as one job rather than two.
- Do we want product pages indexed at all?
- Category and seasonal pages are worth far more. Individual plant pages carry supplier copy you did not write, they change with the benches, and they are the pages most likely to be matched against a safety question. Speak in categories and seasons unless you have connected something that genuinely holds stock.
Keep reading
- Installing on ShopifyPaste one script tag into theme.liquid, list both store origins, and know why the widget cannot appear on the Shopify checkout.
- Everything for a garden centreSeasonality drives every question a garden centre gets. Plant care answers well, toxicity and site suitability need a person.
- Which document answers a fault question on a Shopify storeShopify generates a refund policy and nothing about statutory rights, which decides which document wins when a customer reports a fault.
- Where the answers stop on a Shopify furniture storeDelivery surcharges are resolved at checkout, where the theme tag cannot reach, and your dimension files are linked from an address that is not your shop.
- Ten years of seasonal advice, all of it still liveTen years of dated advice posts are still live, the consent banner holds the script back, and April ends up answering a November question.
- A garden centre on WordPress, where the archive is the problemWordPress keeps every seasonal post at its own address forever, so a crawl reads April's advice in November. In this trade that is not stale, it is wrong.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.