My Family Vets first came to us for a complete overhaul of their online store. Their original platform was no longer able to meet the demand, so they needed a completely new Shopify Plus store able to deliver advanced functionality and bespoke features such as product subscriptions and smart discount systems. We worked with them to develop a whole new store for their brand, resulting in an improved user experience and a dramatic boost to sales.
This beloved pet retailer had quickly outgrown their original eCom platform.
My Family Vets is a young and dynamic brand, providing a network of vet practices spread right across the UK. They are part of the IVC Evidensia group, although the first iteration of the My Family Vets shop was built as a proof of concept – set up for the purpose of delivering just one bag of dog food to a their existing vet clinic customers.
However, customers loved it and their online store has grown from strength to strength and quickly outgrew their original ecommerce platform.
It was time for a rethink.
What happens when your eCom platform starts to hold you back?
The original store was built on a platform called Kentico. It was functional, and it served it's purpose as a proof of concept. However the team at My Family Vets were increasingly struggling with some of the oddities of the setup as well as finding that their ideas for the future of the store either required significant time & investment to implement or were simply not possible.
It was time to question if Kentico was the right platform to grow their business.
Can you imagine an eCom platform that changed your product URLs of every single product in your store every time you added a new product. That's what My Family Vets team were dealing with.
Optimising their original store for search engines was all but impossible. One key issue was that team were unable to add keywords within product URLs, instead when they added a new product to the store it was simply assigned a unique ID, which became part of the product URL.
But, to make matters worse, when a new product was added to the store, the platform would automatically assign a new unique ID to every single product in the store - terrible for SEO - and meanwhile, there was no structure that allows them to group products within collections such as dog food & treats. Instead all navigation links would go to a pre-filtered collection page that contained all products making it impossible for search engines to index in any meaningful way.
On the plus side, the existing site had some nicely implemented features allowing for a tiered pricing structure that allowed Pet Health Club members to take advantage of a special Pet Health Club price. In addition to this they also utilised multi-buy offers across their product range to increase their average order value.
Most importantly it was possible for these offers to stack allowing a Pet Health Club member to not only take advantage of the reduced Pet Health Club price but to also take advantage of a multi-buy offer all within the same order.
So our challenge was to keep these useful features, while also implementing some new features from their development roadmap. Some of the features they wanted to see on their new platform included:
The first step to any successful Shopify Plus migration is a carefully planned workshop.
Shopify Plus migrations are one of our most in-demand services. Any successful migration always starts with an all-important workshop session.
In our workshops, we like to draw up a plan based on the client’s development wish list, and also their pain points from their existing website. We then work closely with the client as we build out a migration plan with clearly defined milestones that addresses all the requirements.
One of the reasons we work this way is because it allows us to effectively identify & answer all the unknown questions relating to any given project. The workshop provides a clear strategy, while reducing the potential for surprises later – and that in turn allows us to work effectively, delivering results on time and within budget.
In the case of My Family Vets, here’s how our strategy looked.
The very first step is deciding on their store plan. In this case, with all the bespoke functionality that My Family Vets would need, Shopify Plus was the only way to go – giving them unlimited staff accounts, as well as granular control over aspects like discounting which was essential to maintain the existing Pet Health Club discounting as well as their multi-buy offering.
As part of the project we migrated ~1000 SKUs from Kentico to Shopify Plus including rich product data such as feeding instructions & product page videos.
The migration itself was no small task, involving the migration of approximately 1000 SKUs from Kentico to Shopify Plus. This included combining partial product exports with data scraps from the existing storefront, before reformatting it ready for a seamless Shopify import – so it was essential to set parameters and form a solid plan for the migration.
The first step to building the new store involved choosing a base theme. 15 years ago we were almost exclusively building bespoke Shopify stores. However off the shelf themes have come such a long way that they provide a great entry point for even enterprise level merchants.
The theme provides the core functionality for the store, with plenty of out-of-the-box features that then leave us free to focus on the bespoke solutions.
One of the biggest benefits of Shopify is the huge ecosystem of off the shelf apps that are available to extend the functionality of your store.
Selecting the right tech partners for your store can be overwhelming if you're new to the Shopify eco-system. However, with our 15+ years of working on Shopify we've become experts at finding the right partners for our clients.
For My Family Vets we worked closely with Recharge Subscriptions to launch a product subscription model, including giving customer the option to subscribe & save to their favourite pet food.
Approximately one million active members continued to enjoy their membership discounts without disruption during the Shopify Plus launch.
One of the most vital requirements for the migration was a seamless transition for the existing Pet Health Club members. There needed to be zero disruption to existing members and new members needed quick access to their discount.
One of the biggest complications is customers could sign up to memberships through many different channels. Some memberships were created online while other memberships were started in one of 400+ veterinary clinics across the UK.
The solution was to not disrupt the existing membership signup process and instead to build a custom app that connects directly with the clients existing database of members. This allowed customers to verify their membership and redeem their Pet Health Club discount.
Real time inventory sync significantly reduces the possibility of overselling & disappointing customers.
As part of the migration to Shopify Plus we provided technical support to My Family Vets new fulfilment company as they developed their Shopify Fulfilment App to handle order fulfilment & inventory sync.
As customer satisfaction is a high priority for My Family Vets we also introduced an additional step to keep stock in sync in as close to real time as possible. Every time a customer clicks add to cart our custom app requests real time stock values directly from the fulfilment company.
“The migration to Shopify has been a great success and the Inspira team has provided fantastic support from start to finish. We look forward to working together as we grow the website and work towards"
Happy Shoppers, a Boost to Sales, and Significant Returning Trade. The My Family Vets migration project was a huge success. The new Shopify Plus store delivered all the extra functionality that had been missing from their previous set-up, with some great takeaway stats:
In addition to all that, the flexible new website meant that they could simply do more… thanks to Shopify’s diverse range of tools. For example, setting up one-off landing pages became a breeze, and allowed them to offer special limited-time deals – like a Black Friday discount page.
Most importantly, the team at My Family Vets were all thrilled with the new Shopify Plus store. As their commercial manager Robert Horne told us:
“The migration to Shopify has been a great success and the Inspira team has provided fantastic support from start to finish. We look forward to working together as we grow the website and work towards"
