About Pets at Home
Founded in 1991, Pets at Home is the UK’s leading pet care business, with more than 450 stores around the country. The business provides pet owners with a wide range of products and services including food, bedding, toys, grooming services, and first opinion veterinary care.
The Problem
Pets at Home required a new delivery partner to help them not only tackle challenges with their eCommerce platform, but to enable them to grow and meet their continued demands.
The team at Pets at Home were finding it a challenge to develop new initiatives. As software was not being regularly and frequently released, they could not make changes to their website quickly and found it difficult to adapt to changing customer needs.
The team at Pets at Home were held back by legacy software, and architectural decisions made years ago made shipping new features difficult.
As their eCommerce platform was built on WebSphere, it was critical that the new delivery partner had specialist knowledge and experience of the technology in place.
The Solution
First, we worked closely with Pet’s IT engineers and leadership to understand the business’s needs and pain points. We then set up a dedicated team of experts to support Pets at Home with their eCommerce goals. This enabled us to take ownership of the development and deployment work on the platform.
One of the first new functionalities we delivered was the innovative flea treatment subscription service, enabling customers to easily keep on top of their pets’ care through the web platform. Over the years, we’ve helped Pets at Home expand their digital subscription model to cover new products, such as worm treatment and easy repeat food subscriptions.
When the pandemic started in 2020, the retail industry was faced with a new set of challenges. Adapting to the new circumstances, we integrated and implemented a click-and-collect system to the Pets at Home eCommerce platform. This meant that sales could continue despite the restrictions and that customers could pick up their products safely. The functionality has since been extended to allow delivery from store.
Today, Intechnica’s dedicated team of experts is still working in partnership with Pets at Home. Technical debt has been reduced, legacy architecture has been phased out and the business is now delivering software in a much more agile and sustainable way. We provide Pets at Home with continued, specialist support with their eCommerce platform and work closely and flexibly with their in-house team to deploy changes and release new functionality every few weeks.
Our Impact
Since partnering with Intechnica, Pets at Home have been able to adapt more quickly, and increase revenue through the various custom-built shopping functionalities on their site.
Making changes to the site is no longer a bottleneck for the business, and they have gained increased autonomy over their eCommerce platform.
