13 Mar

How to Sell Pets Online? 7-Step Process to Start Your Online Pet Shop

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Are you running a physical pet shop? Or Planning to start a new pet store?

If yes, you are having a big opportunity to make your business reach worldwide.

Ecommerce is an amazing start to your pet business and it helps you to get traffic quickly. Because you can find many pet lovers or pet enthusiasts all over the world who will frequently look for healthy pets and quality pet products for their lovable pets. So, an online pet shop will help you to reach more customers.

Advantages of selling pets online:

Worldwide customer reach
No shop opening and closing time
365*7*24 customer arrival
Good reach of your brand
Availability of Analytics tools to measure website and customer performance

Hence, let’s discuss how to sell your pets and pet products online in the step-by-step process. It is easy and simple.

How to Sell Pets and Pet Products Online?

Before getting into the discussion, here is the outline of the 8-step process:

Finding a pet niche

Competitor and Supplier Analysis

Choose the ecommerce platform

Build your brand store

Create useful contents

Promote your product

Analyze your site performance

1.Finding a pet niche:

Finding a pet niche involves the following two things:

Which pet are you choosing?

Among a lot of pet lovers, each one is attracted towards different kinds of pets. So, you have to decide, which pet niche you are going to sell - dogs, cats, birds, fishes, rabbits, rats, hamsters, snakes, etc.,

‘Which pet category are you interested in? or Which pet niche suits you?’ Find it. You have two options to do it. Either you can focus on many pets like ‘pets' shop’ or handle any particular pets like a ‘dog shop’.

Sell Pet or Pet Products:

You also have to decide whether you are selling only pets or you can also sell pet products. But selling both is the best choice to find more audience.

How to find your niche?

If you select the niche, then match that field with the following requirements:

You have an interest in that field
You have the passion to continue in that field for a long-time
You are able to solve various queries regarding that category
You are able to produce different contents about that category
You are able to find out the new features or information about that category.

Now, you are ready with your niche.

2. Competitor and Supplier Analysis:

Every niche has several entrepreneurs like you. Hence you have to be unique to get yourself branded.

Finding Competitors

You can use your business keywords in Google or any other search engine. For example, ‘Best Online Pet Shop’. The search results (websites) that are shown in the webpages are your competitors. You can go even deeper. Type ‘Pet Shop in (your location)’. This will give you all the pet shops in that location. So, you can find your competitors easily in your location.

There are other ways are using classified submissions and social media. Every business posts its content on social media where you can find your competitor’s store. The classified websites (Ads posting sites) like Craigslist, etc. are also helping you to find your competitors' store.

Once you find your competitor, you have to analyze what types of pet and pet products that they are selling and how they are engaging with their customers? By finding your competitor’s strength and weakness, you can get new ideas and it helps you to sell more unique products and also it helps you to provide unique content.

Analyzing and Approving Suppliers

The supplier part is the next task after finding a niche and competitor. You can sell your own pets or pet products (if you have one). Otherwise, you have to find the suppliers to supply pets and pet products to your online store.

You can find the suppliers by:

-> If you have local supplier friends, then you can merge with them for a business deal.

-> If not, then you can post free ads in classified submission sites like Craigslist, Ad post, etc., or you can search the suppliers in that classified sites itself.

Your suppliers should be friendly and at the same time, they have to understand your online business clearly. Also, you have to give the commission fee to them at the right time in exchange for healthy pets and pet products.

3. Best Ecommerce Platform:

After all the above processes are done, it’s time to select the best ecommerce platform where you going to design your ecommerce website.

Choose the best ecommerce Software:

The best ecommerce software should possess the following features:

Admin Dashboard:

The admin dashboard is where you can control all your website activities. So, it should be able to handle different factors like product management, customer management, payment process, shipping process, etc. of your online store.

SEO friendly and User-friendly:

The website is made for customers. Hence the platform should be user-friendly (i.e.,) with appealing designs and possess all the customer requirements like customization options, a quick guide to use the website, and easy contact process, etc.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process which we can discuss later, but you have to know that you choose SEO-friendly ecommerce software to rank higher in search results. So, you can receive more audience to your online store.

Multiple Features:

Since your business is online, it gets visitors from different regions. Hence you have to provide multi-lingual (language) options to the customers (if you want to spread your business internationally).

Since your business is online, many of the customers will pay you through online payments even you provide an offline payment option. So that, your website has to integrate the best payment processing options to your store like PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay, Insta mojo, etc., so that your customers will securely make the payment process.

Purchase Commerce is the best ecommerce software with all the above-mentioned features and also contains more of the same. Check out here: ecommerce Software and buy the best ecommerce platform to build your store.

4. Build Your Brand Store:

After selecting the right platform, head on to the platform to build your dream online website. Things to be considered while building the store are:

Website Design:

Your website is the first thing noted by the visitors to get into your online store and make shopping. So, you have to create a website that will attract visitors and then turn them into customers.

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) are the features that are associated with the website appearance. The visitors want to feel better when using your website. It is achieved by making a proper UI/UX design. Also, the loading speed of the website should be faster; if not the users will navigate to your competitor's website. So, avoid using very high-quality images or videos on the website.

Use Colorful Ecommerce Templates:

Since the design is important for your website, you can use templates to achieve your best website design. There are many readymade templates available online where you can design your website.

For instance, Purchase Commerce provides appealing ecommerce templates that are made on the latest Angular technology to design the store. The platform provides many colorful templates.

Look at this ecommerce template, which is dedicatedly designed for pet's store: Rigel- Pet Shop Marketplace Software. If you are not comfortable with this theme, you can switch to other ecommerce templates provided by the Purchase Commerce platform.

Categorize Your Products:

You are selling Pets and Pet Products. Hence categorize it clearly, so that the customers can feel that the website is simple and clean. Also, the category helps them to find a particular product quickly.

If you are selling many pet kinds, then make all the pet kinds separately like dogs, cats, birds and under this main category, you can provide its suitable pet products for each category. For example, provide dog food products under the dogs' main category and display cat food under the cat's category. This customization will be very attractive and the user finds it simple to use your website. As already said, integrate multiple payment gateways for the payment process; and carry the payment checkout process in a single page.

Shipping Process:

Now it’s time to deliver the products to the appropriate customers. You have to find the trusted delivery persons who will deliver the products at the right time. The delivery of products at the correct time will help you to improve the trust in your brand. This proper customer care will insist on the customers shop again in your store.

5. Create Useful Contents:

It is not enough to build your store. Since there are a lot of competitors waiting for you, you have to produce useful content regarding the pets to become unique out of the crowd.

You can create the following types of content:

Image:

Image is the more frequently used content than the text content because it is looking good and easy to know the business concept with one crisp image. You have to design many images regarding the pets that you are selling and post it on your social media platforms.

Videos:

Next to the image, videos are the customer-driven platform where you can create colorful, entertaining, and useful videos related to pets and pet products. Videos are the best way where visitors easily understand your brand and if it is attractive, then you can get more customers.

Articles:

Even though image and video content are created, there are still many people who are interested to read articles and blogs.

Create a Blog: Your blog should have helpful articles related to your pets. Some of the examples are:

-> How to take care of pets?

-> What foodstuffs are given to dogs, cats, or birds, etc.?

-> How to play with the pets?

Likewise, you can create many pets' contents (that should be unique), so that the customers will buy from your shop with free articles.

6. Promote Your Products:

Cheers! Now you have a quality online pet store with free content to provide to your customers. Advertising is the best way to make your brand, reach your customers. Different ways to follow are:

Post on Instagram: Instagram is the image posting platform where you can post the colorful pets' image.
Post on Facebook: Facebook is the top information sharing platform, where you can find more targeted customers, so post image and videos regularly on Facebook.
Post on Twitter: Twitter is the best platform for linking your blog articles.
Post on Pinterest: Pinterest is the famous image posting medium next to Instagram where you can post large images and infographics about pets and pet products.
Post on Other Social media Platforms: If you are getting followers in some other platforms like Reddit, Tumblr, etc., do the post consistently.

Post on Quora: Quora is a wonderful website where you can solve your customer’s queries about pet and pet products and link back your website or article links.
Publish on YouTube: You can upload the videos on YouTube to reach many people. Because it is the second search engine, next to Google.

These are the organic and unpaid ways to promote your blog. If you are affordable, you can also invest the amount in online ads like Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Google Ads, Search Engine Marketing ads (SEM (i.e.,) ads placed on the top of the search results) to drive the audience. But if you work in an unpaid promoting process consistently, then it’s enough for you to get the required customers.

7. Analyze Your Site Performance:

Analyzing the website is the last process but the most important part of your ecommerce business.

Merge your ecommerce pet store with Google Analytics and Webmaster tools, where the analytics tool provides you the customer performance and webmaster tool will provide the website performance.

These analytic results will help you to know, which web page does not perform well. So, you can easily improve that particular webpage with more efficient content with the help of these tools.

You have to carry this step at least 4 times a week so that you can see your gradual business improvement.

Other than this, you can offer a discount on pet products to draw the attention of many visitors.

Hurrah! You are now running a successful online pet store.

Tips to improve your pet shop:

In local places, you can provide different services like pet care, pet grooming, pet walking, etc. that too for free or low-cost to make the brand reachable.
If you are selling abroad, you can refer to some other nearby service places to your customers.
Offers are a good way to attract new customers, but quality and quantity should be equal.
Also, you can sell different pet products to customers. For instance, if you are selling dog, you can additionally sell dog bowl, dog grooming services, dog clothes, dog bones, etc., to encourage the customers to shop more. The same goes for other pets.

Conclusion:

This 7-step process will help you to run your online pet store with more profit. As already said, Purchase Commerce is providing pet marketplace software to build an online pet store, you can purchase the platform at the customized price range. Also, you can get a lifetime subscription fee as free.

Purchase Commerce platform is made of Angular and Nodejs technology and its features help you to build the dream ecommerce website. Let’s chat to open your online pet store.

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