The home and garden industry is at a turning point. While traditional retailers face margin pressures and rising costs, digitally-native brands are winning market share by delivering the seamless experiences modern shoppers expect.
The numbers tell the story: online sales are growing twice as fast as the overall market, with younger generations leading the shift. 84% of Gen Z discovers products through social media, while 47% of Millennials—who spend an average of $770 annually on furniture—prefer to shop online.
We'll break down how successful retailers are transforming their operations with modern POS technology—from personalizing the shopping experience to simplifying complex fulfillment—and show you how to do the same.
Hardware setup and requirements
A POS system for a home and garden store needs tough and flexible hardware that works both inside and outside. From scanning big home items to taking payments in a garden center, the right tools help work go smoothly.
Here are the tools to consider.
Barcode scanner
Garden centers need barcode scanners that work in bright sun and can handle dirt, dust, and water. Wireless scanners that work far away from your POS terminal can scan big items like soil bags, outdoor chairs, or plant pots.
Tablet and terminal options
Shopify’s versatile suite of POS hardware gives home and garden businesses flexible options for faster, more transparent checkout so customers never leave empty-handed:
The POS Terminal Countertop Kit makes checkout at the counter a breeze with popular payment options and itemized costs so customers know exactly what they’re paying for. And with up-to-date inventory data from all channels available directly from the POS system, your staff has everything they need to clinch the sale every time.
Shopify’s Tap to Pay is an all-in-one handheld POS solution designed for efficient and quick in-store transactions. Tap to Pay allows your staff to meet the customer where they are and make sales from anywhere in the store.
Challenges for home and garden brands
Building customer loyalty
Businesses in the home and garden industry benefit from the purchasing power of hobbyists, interior designers, and other dependable return buyers. With 65% of consumers saying personalization drives brand loyalty, creating targeted experiences is crucial. But many retailers struggle to build these connections without a clear picture of customer purchasing behavior.
Creating a standout in-store experience
Today's shoppers move seamlessly between channels—73% use multiple touchpoints during their buying journey. Whether your customers are buying a succulent or a sofa, they expect consistent experiences from discovery to purchase. But many traditional POS systems don't support this flexibility, leaving businesses unable to deliver the seamless service customers expect.
Managing inventory
Beyond typical seasonality challenges, home and garden retailers face increasing pressure on margins from rising material and logistics costs. When winter turns to spring, or holiday decorating begins, you need to forecast demand and optimize stock levels while protecting profitability. This becomes even more crucial as digitally-native brands gain market share through efficient operations and transparent pricing.
Shipping complex products
Home and garden retailers struggle with products that can complicate the shipping process. When shoppers buy items like patio furniture or glass ornaments, they may require special handling and packaging.
Customers may also opt for ship to customer delivery or buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS). Meeting these expectations requires the right POS to manage the inventory and fulfillment process.
How Shopify POS helps home and garden brands
Unify online and offline customer profiles
Modern home and garden retail serves diverse customers with different shopping preferences. While 47% of Millennials prefer buying furniture online, many still want to see pieces in person. And with interior designers influencing both residential and commercial purchases—accounting for 55% of the global interior design market—retailers need a complete view of every customer relationship.
Shopify POS gives you this complete view automatically. No matter how your customer engages with your brand, your staff can instantly access each customer's full history and preferences. This helps them provide more personalized service and build stronger relationships with:
- Residential customers seeking design advice
- Interior designers managing multiple projects
- Commercial buyers with specific requirements
- Repeat customers with established preferences
Provide targeted discounts and loyalty programs
Thriving in a rapidly expanding market means retaining a reliable customer base. And there’s no better way to make sure your shoppers return time and time again than by showing that you understand what they care about. One way to do that is through targeted loyalty and discount programs.
Shopify POS’s powerful CRM tools give businesses crucial clarity through robust, unified customer profiles. These profiles can help you determine if your customers like to shop online and buy in-person, or vice versa, and other helpful data to inform your business choices.
With customers’ purchase history and preferences available at the click of a button, staff are equipped to give personalized recommendations catered to each customer. Coupled with instant email capture at checkout, customers can easily opt in to discount programs, sign up for trade accounts, and join other marketing lists that will keep them coming back.
Shopify POS also intuitively integrates with dozens of third-party loyalty apps to create customized solutions with customer data. With those valuable insights, you can build retail discount solutions optimized for your brand’s growth.
Access to customer insights for in-store staff
With Shopify POS, retail staff can quickly pull up key customer information at checkout, such as order history and contact information, to make recommendations and facilitate orders on the floor. Staff can refer to order history to better assist designers who might have unique preferences and shopping lists.
Offer frictionless checkout options
One of the best ways for home and garden brands to differentiate their business is to offer a smooth checkout process. Shopify POS accepts multiple payment options, including contactless and mobile, so customers can purchase exactly the way they want.
Staff can even make sales from anywhere in the store with Shopify Tap to Pay. Customers can conveniently purchase the couch they’re sitting on right from that couch without trekking to the checkout point. Or they can have their cart sent directly to their email so they can purchase on their own schedule later, streamlining the checkout process whether it starts or ends in-store or online.
This flexibility is especially valuable for big-ticket purchases like furniture, where 75% of Millennials price-check using social media before buying. Staff can meet customers where they're most comfortable—whether that's completing the purchase on the showroom floor or sending a cart to their email for later consideration.
Offer an “endless aisle”
It doesn't always make sense to keep every color or style of a piece of furniture or dishware in a showroom. Sometimes an item is out of stock or available at another location.
With endless aisles, a feature available with Shopify POS, customers can see an item on the showroom floor, and browse all the colors and styles available online on connected hardware, like a mobile POS tablet. Then they can place the order and have it shipped to home.
Create draft orders
For a big-ticket piece of furniture, customers might need to consult a partner or take measurements before committing to the purchase.
With Shopify POS, staff can create draft orders, a powerful in-person selling tool that helps staff create open orders on behalf of the customer and attach their information to that order.
Draft orders move seamlessly across retail locations, devices, and sales channels so that if edits are required, staff can easily pull up the order to change product quantities or customer details. Staff can also email draft orders to customers so that they can buy from home when they’re ready.
Offer multiple fulfillment methods
Getting big items like huge plants or king mattresses to customers is tough. People want different ways to get their oddly shaped or breakable home goods.
Some shoppers might buy fragile things online but pick them up at the store to keep them safe. Others might buy large items while shopping but need them delivered because they can't fit them in their car. Stores have to handle all of these different needs, which makes selling home goods complicated.
Here are two fulfillment options that home and garden retailers can shore up with Shopify POS:
BOPIS
BOPIS has grown popular with shoppers. It lets customers shop on websites but get their items at the store. BOPIS works great for delicate things people want to handle themselves, or when they don't want to wait for delivery.
Shopify POS makes this easy for store owners by connecting all their locations' inventory. You can let customers pick up their online purchases at any store or warehouse, giving shoppers more choices about where to get their items.
Ship from Store
Retailers can also use Shopify POS to allow customers who visit a store to buy an item there and have it shipped home.
With the Ship from Store feature on Shopify POS, customers can check out in-store and have their items delivered wherever they want them, whether that’s their own home or a friend’s or family member’s home. Staff can manage fulfillment tasks directly with Shopify POS and print packing slips and shipping labels on their own.
Forecast demand and optimize your inventory management
Seasonality is one of the biggest challenges of the home and garden industry. Products like holiday decorations and summer garden furniture experience sales peaks and valleys, so you need a POS that can help you optimize stock levels in your stores and warehouses.
Shopify POS offers powerful tools to anticipate demand so you’ll never experience stockouts during peak seasonal periods, nor get stuck with excess stock once the season passes.
But inventory issues don’t only come with seasonality. Many home and garden businesses find that reconciling general inventory across channels is time-consuming and difficult. With Shopify POS, you can rest assured that you’ll always have the most up-to-date inventory data from all your sales channels in one place without having to incorporate third-party software.
Provide staff training tools
Friendly, helpful staff is key for home and garden stores to succeed. Shopify POS has simple training tools that prepare employees to help customers immediately. Businesses say they can train new staff 90% faster with Shopify POS, which helps during busy seasons or when opening new stores.
The system lets managers set up staff logins with personal PINs in one place, making adding new employees or changing what they can access easy. Managers can also track how well staff members are performing and make sure they get credit for their sales.
When staff can see customer information through Shopify POS, they can give better, more personal help to online and in-store shoppers. Good customer service creates loyal shoppers who come back and spend more money.
📚 Learn: POS System Training Guide For Retailers (2025)
How leading home and garden retailers are adapting
As digitally-native brands capture more market share and consumer expectations evolve, successful retailers are transforming how they operate. Here's how three distinctive brands are using Shopify POS to thrive in this changing landscape.
Venus et Fleur
While many traditional retailers struggle with fragmented systems, Venus et Fleur took a different approach. By building their business on a single platform, they've achieved what 84% of consumers want: truly seamless shopping experiences across channels.
This unified approach helped Venus et Fleur compete effectively against both traditional and digital-native brands, driving 10-15% annual online growth while strengthening their physical retail presence.
“Shopify POS has not only contributed to sales growth but also enhanced our ability to build long-term customer relationships, fueling repeat purchases and increasing the impact of our physical retail presence.” Brendan Gorman, Head of Ecommerce at Venus et Fleur
👉 Read Venus et Fleur’s story.
The Conran Shop
The Conran Shop wanted to save money on custom features, connect all their sales channels, and give customers the same experience everywhere. They switched from Magento to Shopify, which cut their costs in half.
With Shopify POS, store employees can now provide personalized service in-store and online, as well as collect customer information for marketing and business clients. This change made everything simpler, increasing sales conversions by 54%, growing email sales by 23%, and helping the brand quickly adopt new technology.
The opportunity to welcome customers through the door, and use Shopify POS, not only to take sales, but also to capture customer details into our workflows with newsletters, personalised offers and assisted shopping experiences is really important to us.
👉 Read The Conran Shop’s story.
Framebridge
Framebridge was struggling with their expensive custom system as they grew to over 30 stores. They moved to Shopify to connect their online and in-store sales with features like saving items in carts across devices, BOPIS, and iPad consultations that show customers custom frames in real time.
Now their more than 250 store employees can easily handle sales from one system. Shopify POS improved their business, with 15.3% more people adding items to carts, 8.1% more starting checkout, and 7.5% higher overall sales conversion.
We not only replaced all the technology powering our retail stores with Shopify POS, but we also did a full site redesign that changed the entire ecommerce experience for our customers.
👉 Read Framebridge’s story.
Grow your home and garden business with Shopify POS
Your POS system should alleviate stress and add value, not pile on to your day-to-day business management. With Shopify POS, you’ll get easy-to-use solutions for any challenges you face. Equip your stores and staff with purpose-built tools that help you optimize your inventory, make the sale, and sow long-term customer loyalty.
Shopify POS helps home and garden retailers meet customer expectations for flexibility and convenience while managing a particularly fragile and cumbersome inventory in warehouses and storefronts. Plus, they can use the platform to connect across online and in-store touchpoints and encourage repeat business.
