Pet Drugs Online

Background
Pet Drugs Online
www.petdrugsonline.co.uk
Established and run by qualified vets, Pet Drugs Online (PDOL) supply prescription and
non-prescription medication, accessories and food products directly to pet owners,
providing a cost-effective alternative to buying from traditional vet’s practices.
Goals
To create a strong and credible PDOL brand, to implement a new ERP system to cope
with increased orders, and build a class-leading website to ensure and accelerate
growth.
Industry
Retail, E-commerce
Partner
True Digital
1st Floor Royal London Buildings
42-46 Baldwin Street
Bristol
BS1 1PN
www.truedigital.co.uk
Jack Thompson
Business Development Manager
[email protected]
To be a class-leading website, it needed to be:

Robust and scalable for future increases in demand

Provide optimal performance to handle high level of traffic

To be easy to use across all devices in order to drive engagement and loyalty
from customer base.
Challenges
In 2014, True Digital’s focus was three fold: to help PDOL stand out as a trusted and
respectable brand in a market full of 'me-too' competitors where new entrants
appearing with increasing frequency; to integrate seamlessly with PDOL's new ERP
system in preparation for a significant increase in transactions; to build a future-proof,
sector-leading website that can both accommodate and accelerate ambitious growth.
As the distribution of medicine is heavily regulated, the site must be compliant with the
Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD). This affects the way that certain products can
be promoted on site by way of up-sell/cross-sell and surfacing in search results.
Regulated products require different levels of information to be captured at point of
sale. For some types of medicine, the customer is required to provide one or more
prescriptions covering their order, with some products needing original copies (not
digital copies) as opposed to others for which digital copies will suffice.
Considering the customer can have
a mix of different types of product
in their basket, this makes for a
complex checkout journey, but
True Digital didn’t want it to feel
complicated to the end user. Their
goal was to make the site as easy
and pleasurable to use by
customers and hide any of the
complexities from them.
“I read with interest what
happened when M&S launched
their new site. 8.1% sales
reduction in first quarter
following launch. 4.6% in
second quarter. We launched a
class leading website and
transformed every business
process. And within 8 weeks of
launch – just 8 weeks – we had
our largest sales day ever.”
Simon Sutton
Managing Director
Pet Drugs Online
Integration with the ERP (as the master data repository) was required to be seamless
ensuring:

data is transferred correctly between the two systems

with no perceptible delay to the user

the ERP isn’t flooded with too many calls when the site is under load

the website can work independently of the ERP in the event of the ERP being
unavailable
It was important to ensure the site was scalable and could cope with increased
demands in the future and sustain growth for years to come. The site would need to
process a high volume of orders a day, so performance was crucial for the new
website.
The migration to the new platform needed to be as painless as possible, both for the
business in terms of downtime, and for existing users, to ensure the transition to the
new site was easy for them.
Thousands of user records were required to be transferred from the old site to the
new in a way that ensured there was no interruption to the service. Additionally, True
Digital wanted to increase password security as they were moving to a tokenized
payment system where the website would be able to process payments without the
necessity for the customer to re-enter their card details, whilst maintaining PCI
Compliance.
Solution
Working closely with the PDOL team, True Digital developed a new brand proposition
positioning the company as the pet owner's other best friend – the people who make it
easy to do the best for your pet. True Digital created a new logo and visual identity,
with brand guidelines to ensure consistency across all communications. Their work was
validated by focus groups and online surveys to Pet Drugs customers. It received an
overwhelmingly positive response.
True Digital’s UX team worked through countless scenarios
to step a customer through the checkout process in a
straightforward manner. They user tested these journeys and
tweaked them until they were satisfied that they had the
most streamlined journey possible.
User testing also helped to define a new site structure
and information architecture. True Digital incorporated new
content to explain the ordering process, share veterinary
expertise and reassure users about the prescription process.
The site now allows customers to upload photos of pet
prescriptions from their phone to make the whole process
more convenient than ever before.
The site is fully responsive, so works elegantly on all devices.
One of the great features of Kentico is that while it ships with a large number of
functions out-of-the-box, anything that’s not quite right for your requirements can be
extended. True Digital’s philosophy is to deliver a solution that is tailor made for their
clients, and as such they added a number of customisations including:

Creating a custom shipping engine to allow shipping charges to be set by
territory

Building custom functionality to add product variants thereby allowing multiple
option categories on a product (e.g. size and colour) and allowing stock
availability to be set at variant level for each combination of these options

Creating a custom payment gateway to interface with SagePay and enable
Tokenisation

Creating custom scheduled tasks to facilitate scheduled syncing of data with the
ERP

Developing custom form controls such as the Multi Document Selector
To interface with the ERP, True Digital built a sophisticated API layer to sync data
(navigation structure, inventory, customers, orders and prescriptions) between the ERP
and the website. To ensure the website could work independently of the ERP, and not
overload it, the data updates were performed on a scheduled or JIT (Just In Time) basis
i.e. when needed e.g. for validating stock availability on add to basket and again at
checkout. Data pushed to the ERP was placed in a queuing system so that if the ERP
was unavailable it would resync once the ERP was available again.
To ensure optimal performance, True Digital developed the site in MVC to give them
complete control over the mark-up delivered to the browser, this way they could
ensure semantic mark-up with optimum performance. Additionally, they ensured that
they’d cached any database calls to ensure that the site was as quick as possible even
when under any load. This was achieved by creating a caching layer around Kentico API
calls.
The site has been built to be scalable and True Digital are hosting it in the Amazon
cloud so that they can scale the hardware up and add virtual servers as the site grows.
They use Amazon S3 as a CDN for hosting product, prescription and pet images
ensuring that images are served and pages are loaded as quickly as possible.
We have integrated the solution with the following 3rd party providers:

Khaos Control (ERP)

Feefo for independent customer reviews

Sagepay using the Server integration to process card and PayPal transactions and
enable Tokenisation for remembering customer’s card details in a PCI compliant
manner

Postcode Anywhere for postcode lookups
The site has been optimised for search and built with tracking in place to deliver
advanced e-commerce analytics.
Prior to go live they performed
complete end to end testing
on a beta site and invited a
selection of users to trial the
new site as a final phase of
user testing.
Results
Customers are spending 80%
more time on the site. The
bounce rate is down 26%.
There's been a 3.3% increase
in returning visitors, a 7.4%
increase in transactions from
mobiles and a 7.91% increase in mobile conversion. Year on year sales up almost 20%.
Key criteria for selecting Kentico
Pet Drugs Online shortlisted two e-commerce platforms for their site re-platforming:
Kentico and Magento – a formidable rival given they are an extremely well established
and popular e-commerce solution.
True recommended Kentico over Magento for three reasons:

Extensibility – the system needed to be highly extendable and customisable in
order to accommodate the requirement to build a complex integration with a
third party ERP system (Khaos Control), which acted as the master repository for
all data.

Marketing automation – the ability to deliver highly personalised campaigns
to users thus converting prospects to customers and driving loyalty and
engagement from customers by delivering relevant content to them. This sets
Kentico apart from Magento, as it is not something that Magento can deliver on.

Cost / Value for Money – with Kentico, you get a huge number of features
straight out-of-the-box which provides good value for money. When compared
with Magento Enterprise, which is licensed per server per year, it works out to
be much cheaper.
PDOL were impressed with Kentico’s well-designed, easy-to use interface that feels
responsive and the Marketing Automation suite provided them with confidence that
they would be able to continually optimise the website in future. Based on this they
took the decision to re-platform on Kentico rather than Magento.