Orchid Online Shopping: Newbie Experience Sharing and Buying Tips

These days online shopping is very common, and buying orchids online is the channel through which many orchid growers obtain most of their orchids, but faced with all sorts of merchants, buying orchids online feels so inadequate, and if you are not careful you will get scammed. When it comes to being scammed, orchid growers' various tales of blood and tears never stop.

There are several situations when buying orchids online: one is buying from fellow orchid growers on forums, or from forum merchants; another situation is directly searching on Taobao and then buying. You cannot say which of the two is most reliable, since both have good merchants and unreliable merchants, so in the end flower lovers still need to keep their eyes open, must not be impatient, and must not covet cheap prices. Below is a summary of some experience, hoping it can help orchid growers.

1. When buying plants, region is the first choice (not every part of the country produces orchids, so flower lovers should pay attention). I basically do not even look at plants from certain places, because the water there is too deep; although there are good sellers, they are too hard to pick out.

2. You can buy the plants of relevant famous masters or forum moderators on professional forums. Although the plants are a bit more expensive, the variety is very guaranteed, and the plants are easier to grow, so they will not go from one generation to the next getting worse.

3. If buying from a forum, you must look at the registration time. The longer the registration time, the more reassuring it is relatively speaking; after a long period of screening, the scammers have mostly been filtered out.

4. You can search the seller's posting records and other people's comments about this seller, and also look at posts from past years related to the plants this seller has sold.

5. Buy plants by looking at the flowers. Plants like Da Fugui have water that is too deep, and it is very easy to buy a counterfeit.

6. Although reputation is one of the reference factors, you cannot fully trust reputation (especially on Taobao). For orchid sellers, the higher the reputation, the better is not always true; if it is too high, instead you should be on guard about the origin of his plants and their method of propagation. On the contrary, some who have been registered for a long time but do not have high reputation have plants that are more worth buying, because many of them do not make a profit from orchids; most of them are doing it as a hobby, and the plants they grow are mostly genuine.

7. Look at the pictures taken by the seller. If the pictures are blurry or there are no root photos, you must be extra careful.