Growing Pains, Solved: How Wellspring Gardens Keeps 865 SKUs in Sync Across 6 Marketplaces

Peel back the silvery skin of an Ice Cream banana, and you will find something pleasantly familiar with a twist. The soft, sweet fruit inside still tastes unmistakably like a banana, but with a remarkably creamy texture and a subtle hint of vanilla. 

It’s also just one of more than 20 banana varieties Wellspring Gardens sells, out of 865 SKUs total: figs, elephant ears, carnivorous plants, and plenty of plants most people have never grown, or even heard of, at home.

Wellspring Gardens started in 2003, when Donovan Baltich’s parents quit their full-time jobs to chase a passion for plants they couldn’t yet afford to build a store around. eBay was still new, and it offered them an opportunity to give their dream a shot. So that’s where they started: with one plant.

“We started with one banana, the Dwarf Orinoco banana,” Baltich said. “And now we sell well over 20 varieties.”

Since then, Wellspring Gardens has grown into a sprawling greenhouse operation with extensive varieties of figs, mulberries, kiwis, and more in Lakeland, Florida. There’s a focus on edible plants, but they also carry a wide assortment of ornamentals. Lorenza, an orange tabby, patrols for pests. A converted horse stable serves as the fulfillment center, where a team in matching aprons keeps everything, from the plants to the packaging, running exactly as it should. His parents aren’t involved in day-to-day operations anymore, but the nursery sits right in their backyard, close enough that they can still look out the back door and see it running.

A different kind of green thumb

The kids run it now, and it wasn’t really the plan for either of them.

Baltich, now the company’s chief operations officer, studied communications and worked in healthcare PR before joining full time five years ago. His sister, Kirsten Maghraoui used to be a middle school teacher; now she runs production alongside him.

“My parents are overjoyed. They never imagined either of us coming and working full time. But to get both of us, I think, is a real treat for them,” Baltich said.

What hooked Donovan wasn’t the plants. It was the systems.

“I might like logistics more than I like plants,” Baltich said.

The mess behind six sales channels

That’s a useful trait, because Wellspring Gardens doesn’t sell one thing in one place. The fully online, mail-order nursery ships “baby plants” across six channels, with 865 active SKUs to keep straight on every one of them.

Before ShipStation, that meant doing it by hand.

“Let’s say we had 400 of a plant,” Baltich said. “You list 100 on Amazon, 100 on eBay, 100 on Etsy, and 100 on our website. Amazon sells out, so you go in manually, pull 50 from eBay, and reallocate it. Inevitably, you’re going to make a mistake.”

Oversell on Amazon, and the penalties follow. Wellspring Gardens tried three different sync tools before ShipStation.

“There were issues with each one of them,” Baltich said.

Plants raise the stakes in a way most inventory doesn’t.

“Selling plants is very different than selling any other kind of tchotchke,” Baltich said. “Your inventory dies on you, or it thrives on you, or it’s not looking good enough to ship.”

One source of truth

ShipStation gave Wellspring Gardens one place to manage stock instead of six different channels to keep up to date.

No more manual math. No more late-night reallocating.

“Not only are you freed up, but you’re not making mistakes, and you’re not overselling,” Baltich said.

Built by a self-described superuser

ShipStation’s inventory sync was the entry point. What Baltich built on top of it is where it gets interesting.

“I think of myself as a ShipStation superuser,” Baltich said.

The numbers back him up. He’s built more than 200 automation rules, up from zero when he joined. Nine packing slip templates get auto-selected per order, with state abbreviations and scientific plant names filled in automatically. Because Wellspring Gardens’ standard pots weigh about the same every time, automation rules predict box size and weight closely enough that the team pre-prints shipping labels hours before a box gets packed. ShipStation’s Rate Shopper picks the carrier on larger orders automatically, so nobody has to price-check by hand.

A bundling feature lets the team sell three plants as one SKU, with ShipStation deducting each one from stock automatically. It’s especially handy during peak season, when the alternative is doing it by hand under pressure.

The payoff

That’s time back for a team that grows to 12 people during the March-to-June rush. It’s also confidence: inventory syncs automatically across every marketplace, so the team can keep testing new channels without the mess that used to come with them.

What’s next

On TikTok, Wellspring Gardens has built an audience most retailers would envy. Baltich and his team use the account, @wellspringgardens, to walk followers through the plants nobody else is selling: rare banana varieties, elephant ears the size of umbrellas, carnivorous plants catching bugs on camera. It’s earned them more than 13,000 followers and 74,200 likes, with individual videos pulling in tens of thousands of views, built almost entirely on the plants themselves.

TikTok Shop, the platform’s built-in storefront, hasn’t caught up to that audience yet. Baltich sees it as a huge opportunity.

“If our TikTok Shop caught up with our TikTok audience, it could probably increase our business 150%. That’s very likely,” Baltich said.

That same appetite for unusual plants is part of why the collection keeps growing. What started as one banana variety is now more than 20. That same curiosity about what makes a plant thrive turned into its own product: Banana Fuel, a proprietary fertilizer formula developed around the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences’ recommendation, using a 3-1-6 blend. It’s become one of Wellspring Gardens’ biggest funnels for new customers.

From one banana plant on eBay to 865 SKUs, six marketplaces, and a fertilizer with its own following, Wellspring Gardens has come a long way, and ShipStation has been part of nearly all of it. Baltich has even joked about changing the branding entirely.

Ready to sync inventory across marketplaces without the spreadsheet math? Start shipping with ShipStation today.