Pet care retailer Pets at Home has launched a 1 Hour Click & Collect service powered by the Order Management Solution (OMS) from OneStock.
The launch supports the pet care retailer’s omnichannel strategy, allowing the business to empower customers to find all the product solutions and services they need to keep their pets happy and healthy.
Pets at Home chose to work with OneStock following an extensive selection process. The aim was to offer fast and flexible delivery options, such as 1 Hour Click & Collect and contactless collection in store.
Adapting to the pet care business niche needs and facilitated by their middleware, OneStock was able to deploy its OMS into the pet care business’ IT ecosystem in under 6 months.
After an initial rollout to 40 stores, the success of the deployment and the ease of adoption by staff accelerated the rollout to an additional 410 stores in just one week and is now live in all stores across the network.
In order to help their customers receive their products as quickly as possible whilst simultaneously relieving pressure from the distribution centres, Pets at Home launched a 1 Hour Click & Collect service.
During the pandemic, this allowed stores to fulfil online orders, allowing consumers to ensure the stock was available before they visited the store, while giving them the opportunity of saving on delivery costs, both considerable benefits to the customer.
Customers can see which of their items are available in which stores and order from the store of their choice in a matter of minutes. 1 Hour Click & Collect also allows customers to get their orders considerably faster than before when shipped from the central distribution centre.
On average, orders placed with Pets at Home 1 Hour Click & Collect are ready for collection in as little as 30minutes, and since launching 20% of all online orders are fulfilled by the 1 Hour Click & Collect service. To date, 300k orders have been placed via the new fast-track collection service.
Chris Holyland, Group Digital Director at Pets at Home, commented: “OneStock’s 1 Hour Click & Collect solution helped us deliver customer convenience and speed of collection into our customers’ buying journeys at a particularly important time.
When pet owners make a purchase, especially if it’s pet food or essential accessories such as bedding, they want to access it as quickly as possible in order to care for their pet. As a nation of pet lovers, our pets became even more important to us during the pandemic, so being able to offer fast and flexible fulfilment to shoppers was a key evolution in our customer experience strategy,” he added.
Romulus Grigoras, Founder and CEO at OneStock, commented: “We know that the popularity of express click and collect is rising amongst UK consumers. Research in our latest report showed that more than two thirds turned to click and collect while non-essential retail was closed during lockdown. This increased adoption has evolved shoppers expectations around speed of in-store collections, with fast fulfilment options the order of the day.”
Original research of over 2,000 UK shoppers in OneStock’s latest report Omnichannel Study: How retailers can serve the post-Covid shopper showed that 57% now want to see quicker collection for click-and-collect available in stores, and half (50%) now want retailers to offer fast-track 1-hour express click-and-collect services.
“Pets at Home is a retailer that has always put customer – and their pets – front and centre of its business strategy, so by building in new convenient and fast fulfilment options it can ensure it not only meets evolved customer demands, but can run ahead of them. By unifying stock visibility centrally, orders can then be picked from any channel, meaning retailers can extend their available ranging and fulfilment options to improving customer convenience, conversions and customer-life time value,” Grigoras concluded.
The implementation of the 1 Hour Click & Collect service was only the first stage in Pets at Home’s omnichannel roadmap. Testament to the success of the 1 Hour Click & Collect implementation, the pet care business intends to extend their order management solution to include a Ship from Store stock to customers’ homes solution by Summer 2021.
