PETS DELI Relaunch
Recently, we relaunched the web shop for PETS DELI. The company’s mission is to deliver healthy and convenient pet food for caring pet owners. To support them in doing so, we aligned the brand strategy to the right target group, set up a customized web shop based on the Spryker e-commerce framework, and ran a whole lot of user tests.
Branding
Prior to the actual development process, our brand team analyzed PETS DELI’s potential target group and came to the conclusion that the focus on healthy and fresh pet food should be made as explicit as possible. The brand is not offering some kind of luxury goods for people with high income. On the contrary, PETS DELI aims to deliver sound pet food for everyone. Since our brand goal was to convey the message of healthy and fresh nutrition for cats and dogs, we decided to move away from the golden and kind of noble looking visual design the company had previously used and turned instead to designing a new logo, color scheme, and visual appearance in general.
Spryker-Based Development
In his recent post, Tobias already gave some insights into why we decided to migrate the existing shop to Spryker and how we customized the framework for PETS DELI. Besides a huge potential market and the requirement to remain flexible and scalable in the future, another reason was the form of certain products. Apart from rather common items, PETS DELI offers product packs, which are assortments of configurable products.
Due to these items we had the objective to build a custom configurator, which could handle the removal and auto-replacement of specific ingredients. Initially, we were going for a rather detailed configurator, which would enable customers to choose exactly how many menu boxes of a certain type should be included or how unchecked menus should be replaced. After running some user tests, however, we learned that we were giving customers more freedom of choice than they actually cared about. Most pet owners simply need to exclude ingredients their pets won’t eat, but they don’t want to mull over too many options. In the end, they don’t eat the menus themselves, their pets do.
What we ended up with is a neat, easy-to-use configurator whose visual appearance is dominated by images of the respective menus:
In addition to the capabilities Spryker has to offer when it comes to customizing a web shop, the framework enabled us to reduce the server response time significantly compared to Magento. As a result, the bounce rates decreased by about 35%.
Throughout the whole development process we continuously ran user tests using click-dummy prototypes to reconfirm whether we were headed in the right direction. Besides valuable insights we gained regarding the configurator, the results of our tests indicated the advisability of significantly reducing the image weight / amount of images throughout the whole shop and tackling smaller issues with respect to the layout or visibility of certain page elements.
Mobile
Since PETS DELI has to account for more than 50% of mobile/tablet traffic on their website, we had to ensure proper and smooth access to the shop on mobile devices. We built the whole front end from scratch, always having a good mobile experience and touch friendly design in mind. We are constantly optimizing the mobile experience, doing intense cross-device testing, and will soon launch a progressive web app for PETS DELI, which will make mobile access even faster and smoother.
The Relaunch and After
Real customer feedback is essential for building a great product, so we decided to launch early with a far-from-perfect version, where some parts like the “Jobs” page were even still missing. Sure, we could have launched a few weeks later with a more complete website, but when you do that, chances are always that you will get tangled up in too many details and lose track of what’s important for the actual customer. Due to the early launch, it was a lot easier to obtain useful data from HEAP analytics, Google Analytics, mouseflow, Formisimo, hotjar, and other tools or to perform quick and affordable user tests on rapidusertests.com.
Within the first weeks after the launch, we were able to derive valuable insights and to implement some on-the-fly improvements. For instance, we slimmed down the layout of the catalogue page, which resulted in a noticeable conversion uplift, or we included the most viewed information from the FAQ section in the detail pages.
Looking ahead, we will continue to learn from the feedback we get from customers and improve the shop accordingly. We’re also planning to implement a couple of nice-to-have features like some animations, for instance:
Relaunches often take a lot of time and in the end don’t live up to expectations in terms of conversion uplifts. The PETS DELI relaunch was different, however. We had a clear shift in the branding strategy and focused a lot on user testing to improve the UX. In order to get real feedback on our optimizations, we purposely launched as early as possible. Due to a modern front end on a flexible Spryker back end, we’re confident that there won’t be another relaunch anytime soon. We will continue to improve the current shop step by step and we already have some bigger ideas planned for the near future. Stay tuned! ;)
