In this story
Petbarn is Australia’s leading pet retailer. From pet food and toys to grooming and veterinary services, it’s the one-stop-shop for everything pets. As an omnichannel business with 240 stores and 12 distribution centres nationwide, they’ve built a strong physical and online presence, as well as a solid reputation for their on demand and same day delivery offerings.
Their reliable, speedy shipping differentiates them in the competitive pet retail market, with diverse checkout delivery options driving higher conversion rates and delivery expansion building customer loyalty and retention. To keep this promise, they needed the right shipping solution that is scalable, reliable, and manages their same day and scheduled deliveries from the same place as their standard deliveries.
By partnering with Shippit, Petbarn has streamlined its fulfilment process, expanded its 2-hour on demand and next day delivery capabilities across its key locations and optimised its standard deliveries at the same time.
The challenge
Managing online fulfilment and deliveries for a nationwide network like Petbarn’s comes with challenges on a new scale.
Products for pets come in all shapes and sizes, with a need for flexible delivery services within metro areas and across regions that can handle bulky goods as well as smaller items.
Often there’s also an urgent need for products like pet food or medication and customers expect fast, reliable service for their fur babies, whether purchasing online or in-store.
While fast, same day, and next day deliveries are great for customers, Petbarn was facing the internal challenge where many of its stores are based in dense metro areas with small storage space. This was making it difficult to support on demand fulfilment and carrier capacity constraints during high demand hours or days. They also faced limitations in carrier selection, delivery speed, and service coverage.
They needed to:
✔ Reduce delivery costs without compromising service quality
✔ Improve customer experience through fast, same day delivery options
✔ Ship mixed size goods to any location reliably and allow for flexibility
The solution
Petbarn integrated Shippit into its online checkout and fulfilment process to boost customer loyalty with improved ecommerce delivery options and optimised carrier allocation.
By leveraging Shippit’s multi-carrier network and smart allocation engine, Petbarn can now match on demand orders with the most suitable carrier based on location, speed, and cost and service.
Key implementations:
- On demand ship-from-store – Same day, next day and click-and-collect orders are fulfilled from 240 stores, ensuring very fast local deliveries, with Shippit powering the carrier selection at store level to optimise for speed and cost.
- Multi-carrier selection – The Shippit platform helps Petbarn select which on demand carrier (2-hour and next day delivery) is best for the order depending on set delivery rules.
- Integration with existing systems – Integrated with Petbarn’s ecommerce systems, Adobe Commerce and Comestri, Shippit’s automated shipping rules recommends the best and available delivery options to customers at checkout.
- Auto upgrade or downgrade – Orders are automatically downgraded to a standard service if it’s as fast as express shipping, or upgraded to express if there’s no cost impact.
The results
Through implementing Shippit, Petbarn expanded their carrier options, and now service a wider network with optimised last mile delivery.
“Before working with Shippit, we were very limited in terms of carrier and service options, along with the radius of where we could deliver,” says Antoun Torossian, National Online & Optimisation Manager at Petbarn.
- Increased spend thanks to reliable deliveries - The ability to ship reliably on demand from their stores, which is mission-critical when a majority of the orders are 2-hour deliveries. They now see 3.5x more spend from customers who choose on demand delivery.
- Increased cart conversion - a comprehensive range of delivery options, ranging from 2-hour delivery to free next day delivery and 30-minute click and collect is setting Petbarn apart from its competitors and boosting conversion at check out.
- Improved efficiency and control – Shippit gives Petbarn a single place to manage and orchestrate its online delivery and fulfilment, saving the team countless hours by simplifying the carrier management.
- Increased customer spending & frequency – On demand delivery has driven 3.5x higher spending per customer, with customers shopping 35% more frequently.
- Operational scalability – With Shippit’s automation, Petbarn has significantly reduced time spent on carrier selection, allowing them to process higher volumes of online orders efficiently.
"Shippit allows us to enable and expand our delivery radius and ship to more customers from our stores, which is the key to unlocking our 2-hour delivery promise. We now have access to more carriers, more delivery options, and more ways for customers to shop and receive their orders exactly the way they want."
— Antoun Torossian, National Online & Optimisation Manager
What’s next for Petbarn?
With Shippit as a strategic partner in making shipping its competitive advantage, Petbarn is well-positioned to continue leveraging their delivery offerings to keep pet owners coming back, over and over again.
"Our delivery options have yielded great responses from our customers,” remarks Antoun. “We want to continue working with the Shippit team to explore even more convenient delivery options like specific delivery windows.”
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