How to price plants: markup, freight, and markdowns

Garden centers price plants by starting from the landed cost per pot (what the grower charged, plus the freight to get it to your yard), multiplying by a markup multiplier set by container size and category, then rounding up to a clean price point like $14.99. The stores that make money at this also decide two things before the truck ever backs up to the gate: how much of each bench they'll lose to shrink, and when unsold plants get marked down.

That sounds like a Friday-afternoon job, and it is. The math below is built so you can run it on 300 plants in one sitting and still make your kid's ballgame.

The core formula: retail is landed cost times a multiplier

The basic pricing formula the trade uses is:

Retail price = (grower cost + freight per pot) × markup multiplier, rounded to a price point

Greenhouse Grower's pricing coverage has been blunt about how uneven the industry is at this. Carol Miller's December 2016 analysis of the magazine's pricing survey, "It's Official: Growers Stink At Pricing Plants", found retailers more consistent than growers, with retail multipliers clustered in a fairly tight band: "The number doesn't range too widely, from 2x to 2.8x, typically." Grower multipliers typically ranged wider, from 1.6x to 3x, and few growers agreed on what even counted as a cost.

The other finding worth taping to the pricing desk: many retailers "would calculate markup without the cost of freight, then add freight and round everything up to a retail price point, such as $4.99." That order of operations quietly costs you money, and we'll run the numbers on it in a minute.

Multiplier vs margin: they are not the same number

The trade talks in multipliers. You hear "we run 2.5x on perennials" at trade shows and grower open houses, but your accountant, and your POS reports, talk in margin, and the two numbers move differently. Greenhouse Grower's follow-up piece, "How Bad Plant Pricing Can Hurt A Good Retailer", defines markup plainly: "The cost of a plant multiplied to reach a sales price. So a 2x markup multiplies the plant cost by two." It also warns that "markup percentages look higher than margin percentages."

Here's the conversion you'll use constantly, because margin equals 1 minus 1 divided by the multiplier:

So when your rep says a 2x plant is "doubling your money," what you keep is half the retail price before your other costs. If you want a deeper walkthrough of the math, our margin vs markup guide covers it from the hardware side and the numbers work the same way at the bench.

Freight goes in before you multiply, not after

This is the single most common plant-pricing mistake, and it's the one the Greenhouse Grower survey caught retailers making. Say a 1-gallon perennial costs you $5.50 from the grower and $0.40 per pot in freight. Watch what the order of operations does:

Freight in first: ($5.50 + $0.40) × 2.5 = $14.75, which rounds to $14.99

Freight added after: $5.50 × 2.5 + $0.40 = $14.15, which rounds to $14.49

That's about 50 cents a pot, which sounds like couch change until you multiply it by 36 pots on a bench and it's $18, then by every bench that rolls in between March and June. Freight is a real cost of the plant, and multiplying only the grower cost means you're moving freight for free. The $14.99 version, checked against the $5.90 landed cost, is a 60.6% margin. The $14.49 version comes in at 59.3%, and that gap repeats on every pot you sell. Our landed cost guide walks through what else belongs in that number if your freight math is more complicated than a per-pot figure.

A price ladder by container size

Pricing every size off one multiplier keeps the ladder easy to explain and easy to audit, and you can always run a different number on a size that sells differently. Here's an illustrative ladder using 2.5x across the board, with freight rolled into cost first. These are example numbers to show the shape of the math, not market prices for your region:

Notice that rounding up to the price point adds a few extra dimes of margin on every line. Nobody drove past your store because the quart was $8.99 instead of $8.75.

Price by variety as well as by pot

A 1-gallon daylily and a 1-gallon patented new introduction can sit side by side in identical pots and deserve very different prices. Patented varieties, brand-new introductions, specimen material, and slow growers all carry higher grower costs, and customers who want them already know they're buying something specific. Those plants can carry a different multiplier than your bread-and-butter annuals without anyone blinking.

Same size, different price is normal in this trade. A slow-growing Japanese maple spent far longer on the grower's bench than a daylily did, and the price should reflect that. If you price it off the same ladder as a daylily, you're giving away the one thing the customer came in to find. The flip side is worth remembering too: a special order, something you never stock and bring in only because a customer asked, can carry its own multiplier because you're taking on the freight and the risk for one buyer.

Price the losses before they happen

Some of what you buy in April will not sell. It will stretch, wilt, get windburned, or sit past bloom until nobody wants it. That loss is a cost of doing business, and it belongs in the price of the plants that do sell.

Run it on the same 1-gallon perennial. You buy 36 at $5.50 each, so the bench cost you $198.00. If your history says you'll lose about four of them, you have 32 plants to sell, and your cost per plant sold is $198 ÷ 32 = $6.19, not $5.50. The general formula:

Effective cost = cost ÷ (1 − expected loss rate)

Price off $5.50 and you're recovering costs on plants that are already in the dumpster behind the greenhouse. Price off $6.19 and the survivors carry the bench. The number to plug in is your own, pulled from a bench loss log (even a notebook column of "tossed 6 sedum, July 12" beats guessing). Seasonal goods behave like this everywhere: if it can't be reordered and it degrades on the shelf, the shelf price has to assume some of it never sells.

Flats, packs, and singles

Annuals sell three ways at once: by the pack, by the flat, and occasionally by the cell. The flat should always be the better deal per cell, because that's what moves volume in May, but the pack price has to stand on its own or you lose the customer who only wants six petunias.

Take a flat of 48 cells, which is 8 packs of 6. One workable structure, again illustrative:

• Pack at $4.49: 75 cents a cell
• Flat at $29.99: 62.5 cents a cell

The flat buyer saves about 12 cents a cell, which is a real reason to commit to the whole tray, and the pack buyer still pays a price that holds your margin. Getting the units right in your system matters as much as the price tags: you want to stock by the cell and sell by the pack or flat so counts stay honest when someone buys two packs off an open flat. Our garden center units guide covers flats, yards, and tons in the same setup.

Landscaper and contractor pricing: build from cost, not off retail

Landscapers will ask for trade pricing, and the instinct is to knock a percent off retail. Resist it. Retail minus 15% cuts into your margin faster than it looks, because the discount comes off the top line while your cost stays put.

On an item priced at $20.00 retail with a $12.00 cost, you're holding a 40% margin. A 10% discount to a landscaper leaves 33.3%. A 15% discount leaves 29.4%. The sturdier approach is to set the trade tier as a target margin on cost, so the trade price follows cost when grower prices rise next spring and you don't have to renegotiate every handshake. The worked numbers and the setup are in our contractor pricing guide.

Set your markdown ladder before you need it

A plant past its bloom loses appeal every week it sits, and one giant August clearance recovers less than a schedule that steps prices down as benches age. The stores that do this well decide the ladder in March, while they're calm, instead of improvising in July next to a bench of leggy petunias. Our nursery inventory insight lays out a worked bench-age markdown ladder and the repotting math that goes with it (when you bump a small plant into a bigger pot, record the repot so the small plant, the pot, and the soil come out of inventory and the bigger plant carries their cost, or its margin is fiction). It's worth a read before you build yours.

The point here is that markdowns are part of the price, not a failure of it. You planned the shrink allowance, now plan the exit ramp.

Put the price on the tag, keep the grower barcode in the system

Every plant on the yard should carry its price on its own tag, with the grower's barcode stored on the item in your POS rather than trusted to whatever sticker survived the truck. When the 2.5x math produces $14.99, the tag should say $14.99, printed from the same record that holds the cost, so re-pricing a bench after a markdown is a label print instead of a marker and a prayer. Waterproof labels matter here because a paper tag in a mist house has the lifespan of a mayfly. The full setup is in our plant tags guide.

How Rundoo handles plant pricing

If you're comparing systems, here is how the steps above map to Rundoo. Every product carries a Price Strategy: Dollar (you type the price), Margin (computed from cost at a margin you choose), or Discount (a percent off Tier 1). There's no separate markup strategy, so if you think in multipliers, you enter the equivalent margin from the table up top: 2.5x means 60%. Price rounding to .99 is available, and the strategy can change by department, vendor, product, or tag, so patented introductions can run a different number than bedding annuals. Each container size is its own product with its own price and count, units of measure let you stock a plant by the cell and sell it by the pack or flat, and landscaper tiers apply on every line, with the customer getting the lowest applicable price among their tier, custom, and job prices. Products > Print labels prints a label for every price change since the last print, which makes the markdown ladder a print job, and Dooey, Rundoo's AI assistant, can flag margin drops after a cost change and text you a price-change alert. There is more on the garden center page.