Through our work with brands like My Family Vets, we have seen just how powerful the Shopify platform can be for businesses in the pet supplies retail industry – and particularly when you take advantage of Shopify’s incredibly useful features, ranging from product subscriptions, to membership programmes and customer databases.
So today, we’re going to review the options for powering your pet store with the Shopify platform. Here are our top five recommendations, for Shopify features that every online pet store needs to know about.
Top 5 Features Every Shopify Pet Store Needs
1. Product Subscriptions
No matter what else you sell in your Shopify pet store, it’s likely that pet food is going to be one of the main foundations of your business. Animals need to eat, and once pet owners have found the right food, at the right price, this is a transaction that can easily just be automated. A Shopify subscription model allows you to do just that.
With a subscription model in place, your customers can select any consumable product and set an automatic renew date for top-up purchases – saving them shopping time, while building you a reliable ongoing income stream. Subscription features are simply a must for any busy online pet store.
2. Membership Programmes
By the same logic, if many of your customers are likely to return time and again for repeat purchases, then it makes sense to facilitate that – and perhaps even offer them rewards for sticking with you.
Creating a membership system makes it easier for customers to return to your store, log in, and perhaps even create saved lists of their favourite products. But we also recommend rewarding that loyalty from time to time, which can easily be done when you run a membership scheme on your Shopify pet store. For example, when customers sign up as members, why not treat them to the occasional discount, or bulk buy offer?
3. Pet Profiling
Once you start building that rich relationship with your customers – and going beyond one-time anonymous purchases – there will be other ways you can use this relationship to improve the ecommerce experience for both sides. For example, pet profiling. Look at it this way: a customer who used your store to buy a reptile terrarium might not respond to ads for cat food. But by getting to know your customers and their pets, you can make sure they’re seeing relevant content when they visit.
This can be an incredibly powerful approach. You might even track ages and breeds – say for instance, you know that a certain customer has a two-year-old labrador – and then that customer can be shown products perfectly targeted to their pet. The result? More sales for you, and a more personalised, relevant and meaningful experience for your shoppers.
4. Product Quizzes
In ecommerce, frustration can be one of the leading causes for shoppers bouncing off a site. If the categories don’t make sense, if desired products are listed as out of stock, if the store is not logical to navigate… chances are, that shopper will go and look elsewhere. But creating product quizzes is a fun way to figure out exactly what each customer is looking for.
By quizzing your visitors about their pets, their needs, and their preferences, it suddenly becomes much easier to tailor the shopping experience around them. The data these quizzes collect can then feed straight into pet profiling, into personalised store content, and to future email marketing campaigns too. Data is king!
5. Seasonal Offers
Some transactions are evergreen. For example, our first point above – pet food will always be in demand. However, many other products are seasonal – demand will come and go across the year, and your Shopify pet store would do well to be ahead of those seasonal trends.
There’s Black Friday for a start, a great time for special offers, when many consumers may be shopping for larger items they wouldn’t usually purchase. But throughout the year there are many others to be aware of. New pet toys for Christmas – or what about pushing your deals on pet hair removers in the spring, when cats and dogs typically shed their winter coats? Or you could push your calming pet remedies in time for Fireworks Night.
When it comes to seasonal sales, a little clever planning can translate into a lot of extra business. And if you’re really clever, you can even automate these seasonal offers and themes from your Shopify control panels.
Shopify Services for Pet Stores
So there you have it, our top five Shopify features for pet stores. With all these features properly implemented, you can see the potential here for powerful and intelligent ecommerce. How many of these does your Shopify pet store currently make use of?
If you feel you may be missing a trick (or two), why not give us a call? We have been working with Shopify for many years now, helping our clients to create stunning, powerful and smart ecommerce platforms tailored perfectly to their brands, their industries, and their customers.
We can help you set up any of the above features on your own Shopify pet store – plus many other powerful tools besides! So for all your Shopify development needs, talk to Inspira today.
