INDUSTRIES · PETS
Pet ecommerce is won on repeat purchase, and lost on freight.
Demand in this category is more predictable than almost anywhere in retail, because a dog eats the same food every month whether or not you sent the email. What is not predictable is whether the reorder lands with you, arrives at a cost that leaves the margin intact, and carries the grooming booking or the vet visit alongside it. We build and run the commerce engines that hold those together, for pet retailers and pet food brands across Australia and New Zealand.
Pets clients
What changed for pet commerce
Repeat purchases are central to pet food retail, but the timing changes with the pet, the product and the household. Make reordering convenient and give customers control over their next delivery.
Subscription became the competitive line rather than a feature.
Online-native retailers built their whole proposition around autoship and trained the category to expect it. A pet business without a credible repeat-delivery programme ends up competing on price for an order the customer was always going to place, which is the worst trade available at these margins.
Freight economics decide which baskets are worth having.
Pet food is heavy, bulky and thin on margin, and chilled or frozen lines add a second fulfilment path with its own rules. Shipping thresholds, minimum weights, split consignments and store-based fulfilment are commercial levers rather than warehouse settings, and they belong in the same conversation as merchandising.
The pet, not the shopper, is the customer record.
Species, breed, size, age, weight and diet restrictions determine what should be recommended and when the next order is due. Retailers holding real pet profiles personalise against something close to certainty rather than a segment guess, and the ones without them send the same food email to a cat owner and a Great Dane.
What the strongest pet businesses have in common
01
Repeat delivery built into the product rather than bolted onto the checkout.
Let customers change flavour, skip a delivery, move the date and add a one-off item from their account. Use cancellation reasons and support requests to find where managing a subscription becomes difficult.
02
Discovery that filters the way owners actually shop.
Species, life stage, breed size, special diet and health condition are the real navigation in this category, not brand and price. Prescription and vet-diet lines carry their own rules on top, and they cannot be merchandised like the rest of the catalogue.
03
One inventory position across stores, online and services.
Most pet retailers sit on a store network, which makes click-and-collect and same-day delivery the highest-intent journeys they own. Both fall over the moment the stock number on the site disagrees with the stock number in the store.
04
Services carried by the site rather than parked in the footer.
Grooming, training, vet care, adoption and puppy programmes are the reason a customer chooses a retailer over a box on a doorstep. They need to be bookable, promotable and measurable alongside product revenue.
What we usually get asked to fix
including the inventory, loyalty and subscriber data that make a pet migration harder than the catalogue suggests.
from the commercial design through to the self-service controls that stop subscribers cancelling instead of pausing.
structured around species, life stage, breed size, diet and health rather than brand alone.
integrated into the delivery partners and store systems that actually pick the order.
driven off pet profiles, feeding cycles and the value of a customer across a pet's life.
built for the questions owners search before they buy anything.
that puts subscription retention, freight cost and customer value in the same view.
Published client results
+218% Click-and-collect revenue · Animates
FY22 versus FY21
+90% Subscription revenue · Animates
FY22 versus FY21
+50% Number of subscriptions · Animates
FY22 versus FY21
+119% Total online sales revenue · Animates
FY22 versus FY21
Choose the platform around how you trade.
Platform choice in pet follows logistics more than catalogue size, so we would rather map your fulfilment model, store network and subscription ambition first and recommend second.
Map feeding quantities, delivery schedules and fulfilment restrictions. Real Pet Food Company provides a published example of our category work.
Bring stores, stock, repeat delivery and service journeys into the same brief. Petbarn and Animates demonstrate relevant retail experience.
Include stockist ordering, wholesale pricing and direct delivery requirements in the platform brief.
For a group, define how retail, services and subscriptions share customer and stock information across brands.
Animates
One team across platform, retention and retail
Review subscription performance alongside delivery costs, product availability and customer communications. A change in any one of these can affect the next order, so the teams responsible need to work from the same information.
We run pet accounts as a single programme. Strategy and platform selection set the architecture, including how subscriptions, loyalty and services will be handled before anything gets built. UX and CRO work the discovery journey and the reorder journey, which here are two different jobs. Our technology team owns the integrations into ERP, POS, inventory, loyalty and delivery partners so the stock position and the customer record hold up across every channel. Search and content build the non-brand demand around the breed, feeding and health questions owners already ask. Paid media works acquisition against the value of a customer across a pet's life rather than a first order. CRM and retention own the reorder cycle, the loyalty programme and the triggers that come off pet age and feeding volume. Data ties it together, so subscription retention, freight cost and customer value are read in one place.
We agree who owns each part of the work, how decisions are made and how progress will be measured.
Selected pets work
- Adobe CommerceUX/UI & CROPetbarnAn Adobe Commerce launch for Petbarn, completing an inherited build through coordinated development, integration work and rehearsed data migration with Petbarn and Greencross teams.
- Adobe CommerceStrategyAnimatesAdobe Commerce upgrades for Animates, covering local fulfilment, repeat-delivery subscriptions and search, with integrations supporting click and collect and same-day delivery.
- SEOThe Real Pet Food CompanyThree Shopify brand websites for Real Pet Food Company, with tailored brand presentation, frozen-food checkout rules and the ability to activate direct-to-consumer purchasing by market.
On the record.
Perspectives from the people we work with.
“It's been an amazing effort, everyone. Great to see the teamwork.”
Jamie Sparrow,
Business Systems Manager
How healthy is your pet ecommerce engine?
A review built for pet retail and pet food rather than retail in general. We look at whether your repeat-delivery programme is keeping subscribers or quietly leaking them, how discovery holds up against the way owners actually filter a catalogue this size, what your freight and threshold rules are doing to basket and margin, whether the stock position is honest enough for click-and-collect to be trusted, and how much of your services revenue the site is helping to sell. You get back the gaps costing you repeat revenue, and the order we would fix them in.