Expert advice on how to achieve success and thrive through efficient fulfilment strategies.
As your pet products sales increase, the storage, picking, packing and shipping of your items can quickly feel overwhelming. Here are simple rules to help you achieve fulfilment success for your pet brand.
1. Keep your fulfilment journey simple
A wide range of products for a wide variety of pets makes the pet supplies industry one of the most complex. Simplify your operations by outsourcing your fulfillment, giving you one less thing to worry about.
2. Outsourcing this time-consuming process to a trusted fulfilment partner will allow you to save money and focus on other key aspects of growing your brand, helping you succeed in a highly competitive but rewarding market.
3. Make sure your fulfilment is flexible
In addition to planned growth, ensure your fulfilment process can respond quickly to sudden spikes in customer demand.
By reviewing historical sales data, you can identify seasonality patterns. For instance, during the holiday season, pet owners frequently order gifts for their pets, including them in the holiday celebrations.
4. Take storage seriously
Do you need a dedicated area for your pet products to ensure they leave in the same condition they arrived? Or perhaps batch control, stock checking, and quality assurance measures to prevent products from exceeding their best-before dates?
5. Search for reliable fulfilment providers.
Not every warehouse can meet these standards.
6. Offer optimum delivery outcomes
A reliable fulfilment provider ensures that pet brands deliver outstanding customer experiences, covering everything from ordering to packaging and delivery. The standards for order fulfilment are high because these products are meant for the customers’ best friends.
6. Go DTC (Direct-to-Consumer)
DTC-based selling now sits alongside the online marketplace model as a mainstay for fast-growth pet brands. The convenience of DTC is also massively appealing to pet customers, particularly those who know exactly what their animal likes and responds well to.
picking accuracy rate
warehouses in the UK, Netherlands and Spain
sales channel integrations
We’ve partnered with numerous pet supplies brands to streamline their fulfilment processes. Our in-depth understanding of the industry ensures your products are stored, picked, packed, and dispatched efficiently.
We can adapt to the speed and scale your business demand while staying loyal to your brand’s ethos, values and heritage. We build and manage our own technology and we own our warehouses, it gives us full control over all the details of the fulfilment process.
With fulfilment centres across the UK, Spain and the Netherlands, Huboo is ideally positioned to support your global expansion. Our strategically located warehouses enable faster, cost-effective shipping, helping you reach customers worldwide with ease.
We integrate with every major sales channel so you can be wherever your customers are and monitor sales from one single dashboard.
Pet supplements are steadily rising in popularity, with CBD-infused products in particular driving the trend as owners seek the nutrients their animals need to thrive.
It’s left brands racing to find the next buzzworthy breakthrough ingredient, not easy given that only scientifically proven solutions are likely to resonate with this increasingly discerning audience. There’s also fierce competition in this corner of the market, meaning that companies need to think carefully about which sales channels will help them reach the right audiences.
Personalisation is becoming an essential way for eCommerce brands to build relevance and differentiation with customers. In the case of pets, it makes perfect sense – every customer is unique, and so is every pet, hence owners are keen to receive bespoke services tailored to their pets’ specific needs.
Brands that invest more time in understanding their customers’ pets have an opportunity to establish meaningful long-term relationships that will directly improve their bottom line. Some companies are doing this by introducing short questionnaires at the start of the customer journey, enabling them to pull together customised communications and product recommendations for each customer/pet going forward. It also means brands will have more information at their disposal – for example, including the ability to add pets’ names on delivery notes or send out birthday emails with discounts or rewards.
This point around ongoing engagement is particularly pertinent for the pet category, given that many items – such as treatments, food, and supplements – are repeat products with a monthly or quarterly cycle. It’s handy for brands to devise clear strategies between purchase cycles to keep customers engaged, for example, through follow-up emails that contain tips on how customers can make the most of their new purchase and better care for their pets.
But as you try to keep up with ever-mounting product lines and cater to more personalised buying patterns, it inevitably results in more SKUs to manage and keep track of. This, in turn, increases the potential for confusion and delays to creep into the picking and packing process, and of course, the possibility of frustrating customers if problems occur once the order has been placed. Capable warehouse management systems are essential if these issues are to be avoided. It’s not about piling up products in huge warehouses, but about using smaller, self-contained hubs to easily store and manage multiple SKUs, all belonging to one brand, all in one accessible space.
Monthly subscription models are attractive to pet owners because they provide better value for money on products that pet owners have no choice but to keep buying. They’re also much more convenient (no last-minute dashes to the nearest pet shop or supermarket), and as per the aforementioned element of personalisation, subscriptions can even be tailored to the needs and preferences of each pet.
For example, pet owners are also often on the hunt for additional products to meet their wide-ranging needs. It could be that they invested in a supplement to improve their pet’s gut health but now need a product that promotes a glossy coat. Smart brands are meeting these needs through subscriptions by providing curated product bundles – a selection of complementary products priced at a generously discounted rate on a repeat purchase cycle. It’s a powerful tactic for multi-brand pet providers that also adds an element of discovery to the customer experience, helping pet owners find out about new and potentially beneficial products they could add to their regular orders.
However, subscription models only work if products are guaranteed on time and coincide with the previous supply running out. Working with a trusted fulfilment partner gives you peace of mind that mismanaged orders are a thing of the past, ensuring that your customers keep subscribing month after month.
