Garden Centres Reimagined

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Mark Channen

May 20, 2025

Garden centres have transformed. Once known as quiet, seasonal hubs for shrubs and soil, today’s garden centres are evolving into vibrant destination venues that offer full-day experiences for families, hobbyists, and lifestyle seekers. With gourmet cafés, themed gift shops, aquatics departments, in-store events, and even rides for children, the modern garden centre is no longer just about plants, it’s about creating memorable customer journeys.

At the core of this transformation lies not just changing consumer expectations but the strategic use of integrated technology. From managing plant stock and giftware to powering cafés, handling loyalty schemes, and forecasting seasonal trends, garden centres require more than tills and spreadsheets. They need a flexible, scalable ERP solution that gives full visibility and control, and that’s where Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and its partner solutions implemented by Dynavics creates the perfect solution.

In this article, we explore the changing face of garden centres and how a connected technology ecosystem is powering their growth.

The Modern Garden Centre

If we look at modern garden centres, we will often see 5 key focus areas:

Lifestyle Retail

Today’s centres stock a wide range of non-plant items: home decor, gifts, clothing, books, and artisan products. Many centres offer seasonal collections that reflect interior trends.

Cafés and Restaurants

Gourmet cafés and casual restaurants are now a key driver of footfall and revenue. According to HTA (Horticultural Trades Association), catering sales now represent over 25% of revenue for many garden centres.

Pets & Aquatics

Many garden centres now include pet departments or aquatic sections with fish, reptiles, and exotic plants. This creates complexity in stock management and compliance.

Play Areas & Mini Attractions

To encourage family visits and repeat footfall, play areas, seasonal events, and even mini fairground rides are now commonplace.

Expert-led Demos and Workshops

Centres often run workshops on planting, pruning, or sustainability, further positioning them as lifestyle brands rather than simple retailers, and quite often there will be guest appearances from the horticultural world too.

This shift from single-purpose to multi-channel, multi-purpose destinations has reshaped the way garden centres operate. And it demands a robust digital core to support it.

Garden Centre Growth

The UK garden retail market continues to flourish:

The HTA reports annual garden centre sales of £6 billion+
Footfall has increased by over 30% since 2019, as centres become leisure destinations
Catering, giftware, and events are now among the fastest-growing categories
Many centres are expanding online, offering click & collect and home delivery

This diversification, while exciting, brings operational complexity. Managing peak periods, integrating POS, tracking loyalty data, syncing e-commerce sales, and maintaining visibility across departments has become a huge challenge for many operators.

The Case for Connectivity

Running a modern garden centre requires more than great plants and friendly staff, it needs real-time data and operational harmony across departments. Here’s where Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, implemented and supported by Dynavics, becomes essential.

Business Central acts as a single, cloud-based platform to manage:

Finance & accounting
Stock control (plants, products, seasonal goods, food)
Supply chain & order fulfilment
Purchasing and vendor management
CRM and loyalty
POS and retail
Business reporting & analytics

The flexibility of Business Central allows garden centres to scale their business, expand product lines, and introduce new services without creating silos or adding software chaos.

Dynavics supports garden centres with a full ecosystem of integrated tools tailored to retail, hospitality, and service sectors:

LS Retail: Unified Commerce at the Core

Integrated POS for shops, cafés, and seasonal events
Centralised pricing, promotions, and inventory
Customer profiles and loyalty tracking
Click & collect and e-commerce fulfilment

Jet Reports: Real-Time Business Insight

Custom dashboards for sales, margins, footfall, and seasonal trends
Easy drag-and-drop reporting for store managers and finance teams

Adyen: Modern Payments

Contactless and mobile payments
Centralised payment reconciliation
Secure, omnichannel support

Continia: Document Management

Digitised invoicing and payment workflows
Integrated with accounts payable in Business Central

Tasklet: Mobile Warehouse Management

Real-time stocktaking and goods receipts
Enables plant and product tracking from delivery to display

These solutions ensure garden centres don’t just digitise, they streamline, connect, and grow.

Exploring A Customer Journey

Imagine this typical customer journey:

A customer books a spot for a family gardening workshop through your website, linked to Business Central.
On arrival, they check in at the café, where LS Retail manages their loyalty rewards.
Their purchases at the shop, plants, pet supplies, and lunch are all logged in one customer profile.
A POS-linked promotion encourages them to visit again next weekend.
In the back office, sales data and footfall analytics flow into Jet Reports for next-day review.

This is not the future. It’s already happening with Dynavics-powered garden centres across the UK.

One regional garden centre group approached Dynavics with growing pains: siloed systems, manual reporting, unpredictable demand, and difficulty managing inventory.

What we delivered:

Microsoft Business Central to centralise stock, finance, and purchasing
LS Retail to unify POS across multiple departments
Jet Reports for daily store insights
Loyalty programme integration

The result is increased inventory visibility, quick and easy sales reporting, and far more customer loyalty engagement.

Empowering Staff and Making Customer Smile

Garden centres are also employers. With integrated ERP, staff are empowered with:

Mobile POS for outdoor and pop-up sales
Real-time stock checks to help customers
Automated reordering to reduce workload
Access to customer profiles for personalised service

This improves not just productivity, but job satisfaction and customer experience.

What’s Next for Garden Centres?

Garden centres are no longer seasonal stores, they’re year-round destinations with diverse revenue streams and customer touchpoints. To manage that complexity and deliver consistently brilliant experiences, technology needs to be more than an add-on.

Future-forward garden centres are already exploring: