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Chewing on Chewy

Chewing on Chewy

When it comes to business insights, it is always a good idea to look up to the market leaders. And when it comes to a little less traversed industry, this good idea often becomes a necessity because not many have undertaken the journey and that too, successfully. One such industry is the pet retail industry and the brand we will be talking about is Chewy. Chewy is an American eCommerce retailer (platform, works with renowned and trusted retail brands, the concept referred to as store/stores in this blog for reading convenience) specialising in pet food and other pet-related products. In this blog, we will try to derive valuable business insights from this renowned and successful brand.

Extensive Product Mix

Having a wide merchandise mix helps businesses attract and retain customers. It makes such stores one-stop shopping destinations. Customers find it more convenient to visit one place and get their diverse needs fulfilled. Also, such stores easily attract diversified customers based on their needs. For example, a customer with one particular species of a pet may have diversified needs in the form of food, toys, and accessories. Similarly, different types of pets have different requirements making such stores attract diverse customers. It also lends the image of specialisation to such stores.

Chewy is a brand with an extensive range of product offerings making it a one-stop shopping destination as a specialised eCommerce store. This helps the brand attract a large base of customers with both comprehensive as well as unique requirements for their pets. As an eCommerce store with a country-wide distribution network, Chewy is also able to access customers from all market regions in the United States. In addition to the US, Chewy also delivers to a few market regions in the neighbouring country Canada.

24/7 Customer Support

Round the clock customer support is not a commonplace standard. Many companies provide such services but based on time zones. However, Chewy provides perpetual 24/7 customer support services over phone, live chat, and email. This mechanism works for all customers by way of providing convenience and flexibility. For example, some customers may prefer doing these chores during off hours or business owners may seek even greater flexibility.

24/7 customer support is also necessary for urgent or emergency requirements. For example, queries on food ingredients or medicine dosages must find the earliest possible resolutions.

As experienced eCommerce business consultants, YRC maintains that for customers knowing that support services are always accessible provides a big psychological relief to them helping brands and businesses solidify customer loyalty.

365-Day Return Window

Chewy offers a massive and generous return window option of 365 days with a no-questions-asked policy. Prescription medications are not covered in this particular return policy but if a wrong medication product is received or the items received are damaged, the company offers refund or replacement options as per the specifics of each case. Even if medication products are excluded, Chewy has a massive product mix making customers, in general, stand to benefit from the 365-day return window opportunity. As an extraordinary feature, it gives Chewy a significant competitive edge and a strong reason for customers to buy from the eCommerce brand.

Welcome Offers and a Reason to Stay

Chewy gives special offers to its new customers. This may sound like a routine strategy but having it there makes the first impact. After a stipulated bill amount, gift cards and free shipping are offered to new customers on their first purchase. Veteran online business consultants would agree that this often favourably impacts the purchasing decisions of first-time visitors to an eCommerce store. On top of that, all other routine benefits are already available to new customers.

Chewy also provides special discounts to new and old customers who are auto-shipping for the first time. For selected brands, there are also additional discounts on auto-ship orders. On an overall, this serves as an incentive for customers to subscribe especially when they realise that in any case, they will be making these purchases again and again. Although many brands give the option of cancelling auto subscriptions people tend not to. When you are getting a quality product of routine use at a competitive price home-delivered by a brand that gives 24/7 customer support, there has to be a very strong reason to discontinue such a service.

Free Shipping then Flat Shipping Charges

Chewy adopts a strategy for shipping charges that is common among almost all major eCommerce brands and online marketplace platforms in the world. After orders reach a certain predetermined value, there are no shipping charges. What is slightly different with Chewy (possibly for a few other brands as well) is that if the order value is less than that amount, there is a shipping charge but it is a flat amount. It works in two ways. First of all, customers are encouraged to buy more per order (lending cost efficiency to the company). Secondly, customers from any part of the country need not bother about being charged differently for the distance. This brings a greater sense of uniformity in the delivery of services.

Superior UX

Chewy dons an extremely high user-friendly website for its customers. Let us break this down to extract important takeaways. For starters, it has a very tidy and organised website. The navigation is intuitive with a clear and logical framework of content with a top bar that hosts the essential tabs like search, login, cart, product and service categories, and ongoing deals and offers. At no point on the website, there is any feeling of over-stacking of information. At the bottom, the site gives links to the brand’s social handles, customer support lines, app download links, and other general information.

The next point of discussion has to be Chewy’s product pages. The product listing is adequately and meticulously done containing the product title, name of the product brand, customer ratings, product-related FAQs, product variants, high-quality images, price and buying options, product description (overview, ingredient details, feeding instructions, etc.), alternate product options, more about the product brand, and customer reviews and ratings.

Is Chewy doing anything different here? Probably not, but Chewy is showing how to get UX right.

Wrapping Up

Started only in 2011, Chewy has now become a household name in the United States and Canada – two huge and highly competitive pet retail and eCommerce markets. Its extensive distribution network and wide range of product offerings make Chewy a specialised, one-stop shopping destination – helping the brand attract a large base of customers with diversified needs from all over the United States. Chewy’s 24/7 customer support services suit customers from all walks of life by way of providing convenience and flexibility. Superior UX and a 365-day return window opportunity are two more outstanding features of the brand.

It is important for new and existing players, even from different industries, to look up to leading enterprises like Chewy for deriving vital business insights and fundamentals. The lessons may not be replicated but surely can be improvised and applied.

About Your Retail Coach

YRC is a retail and eCommerce consulting brand with a growing global footprint. With more than ten years of experience, YRC has a rich experience of delivering solutions to 500+ clients in more than 25 industries with a success ratio of over 94.5%.

To speak to a professional pet business consultant, feel free to drop us a message and we will shortly reach out to you.

To learn more about our pet business consulting services or general online business solutions, visit us: https://www.yourretailcoach.in/contact/

FAQs

How can I attract new customers for my pet store?

The first thing would be taking care of your existing customers. If your existing customers are happy, they are more likely to recommend your store to their family, friends, and peers. Customer satisfaction is a broad term but to summarise, you must prioritise understanding of buyer personas and consumer behaviour, localisation, layout planning and visual merchandising, product availability, quality of products and services, ease of payment, having easy return and refund policies, develop and implement SOPs for operations, and personalisation.

Secondly, if your business does not have a digital identity yet, getting one should be your priority. Building an online presence will bring your store to the notice of a large base of customers who are searching for products and services that your store offers. You can start with a simple search engine business listing with all the necessary details like phone numbers, addresses, working hours, location mapping, etc. Eventually, you can create social media business pages for your pet store on relevant platforms like Facebook. Slowly and steadily, you can move to paid promotions offered by popular search engines like Google and popular social media platforms.

Author Bio

Rupal Agarwal

Rupal Agarwal

Chief Strategy Officer

Dr. Rupal’s “Everything is possible” attitude helps achieve the impossible. Dr. Rupal Agarwal has worked with 300+ retail e-commerce brands and companies from various sectors, since 2012, to define their growth strategy, push their limits and improve performance efficiency. Rupal and her team have remarkable success stories of helping brands achieve 10X growth.

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    PROCESS AUTOMATION

    The idea of having Ecommerce Consultants on-board from the beginning itself points towards reducing the involvement of the promoters in daily operations. Ecommerce Businesses willing to be a brand reaping profits & sustaining the competition must ensure that most of their processes should be automated. The more the manual intervention, the more would be the errors.

    In Ecommerce business, you get only 1 chance to impress the customer & if you mess up there, you lose the customer for long.

    Process automation in respect to all the activities pertaining to customers from order receiving to order fulfilment is a must for a seamless experience for the customers.

    Task Management is another grey area where most deadlines fail as 90% of the tasks are assigned manually & are forgotten, unheard, misunderstood or mistaken.

    YRC Team of Ecommerce Management Consultants helps to make maximum of the processes system-driven to ensure minimalistic manual intervention.

    VIDEOGRAPHY & PHOTOGRAPHY

    No matter how good your product is, the customer would know only if it looks good.

    Photography includes the following steps:

    • Cataloguing your products
    • Cataloguing your images
    • Backup your images (A few cloud storage solutions include Dropbox, Google Drive, Bitcasa, Apple’s Cloud Storage etc.)
    • Choose the right camera & lens (You may also outsource the photography to a third party agency)

    DIGITAL MARKETING

    Digital Marketing includes SEO & SMM. SEO i.e. Search Engine Optimization includes activities like back-linking, meta tags, blog-writing etc. to ensure your website ranks on the 1st page on Google Search.

    Next comes SMM i.e. “Social Media Marketing” which as the name suggests including promoting your products on all the social media sites, email marketing, influencer marketing & several other BTL activities.

    These activities are going to be recurring & would decide the traffic on the website, the conversions, whether the right target market is tapped, the likes, the views, the orders, the reviews & much more. YRCs Ecommerce Consultants create a budget for digital marketing right from pre-launch to launch & for each month thereafter.

    Building digital marketing strategies in coordination with the agency, selecting them to signing them off would be the role of YRC.

    This ensures seamless coordination, detailed interactions & desired execution as it is always advisable to work with a single agency than multiple of them.

    IT INTEGRATION

    Selection of the right software for smooth functioning of back-end operations right from production to webstore display would be suggested and integrated by YRC Team.

    YRC’s Team defines SOPs of Product Movement, maps it with the locations & people. They then create a blueprint of all the features required in the software & help in shortlisting & selection.

    IT Integration involves connecting your offline inventories with real-time online webstore so when a sale occurs, inventories get deducted real time across offline as well as online platforms.

    This helps in accurate inventory management, maintaining the MOQs, re-order levels & achieving the optimum inventory levels.

    Some popular software include unicommerce, viniculum for your front-end website management & Genisys for your entire back-end Purchase, Production, Accounting, Invoicing etc. management.

    WAREHOUSE & LOGISTICS PLANNING

    • How many cities or countries you wish to sell in?
    • Where should your Warehouse be located?
    • Should you have one warehouse in each country or city?
    • Should you be having your own delivery team in your base city?
    • Would the 3rd party vendors be reliable? What happens when they lose or misplace your product during delivery?
    • How should I manage the logistics if my goods are coming from different countries?
    • How should the goods be stored and barcoded?
    • How much space do I require for warehouse?
    • I am sure several such questions must be haunting you while you think of starting your own fashion ecommerce brand.

     

    At YRC, our warehousing and logistics experts can help you devise a strategy for all of the above mentioned queries and much more.

    We design the layout of the Warehouse considering the inward, goods processing, software entry, barcoding, outward, goods return, scrap storage, goods stacking & much more.

    Logistics route plan is devised considering the manufacturer to your warehouse and from there to last mile delivery locations.

    UI & UX DESIGNING

    This Step involves 03 distinct parts:

    Part 1: Choosing the right Platform:

    From several platforms available in the market right from Shopify to magento, woocommerce, prestoshop, wordpress etc. you must choose the one that fits best for your business

    Part 2: UX Designing:

    “UX” denotes User Experience, which if put in simple language is building the functional requirements of the website.

    UX Designing includes designing the features required in the website, customer journey map, website features, the browsing features, navigation features, ecommerce order management process flow, checkout cart features, catalogue management, ecommerce payment system, cross selling features & much more.

    “As per statistics, 68% of the customers abandon the carts before payment”

    An interesting UX ensures the customer sticks on to the website for a longer time.

    Part 3: UI Designing:

    UI stands for User Interface, which means designing the look and feel of the website. UI includes using the right colours, elements and the entire aesthetics of the website.

    A good User Interface ensures the user completes the task that he has come for. It navigates the user through the journey of the brand in the simplest but most effective way.

    The UX designer maps out the bare bones of the user journey; the UI designer then fills it in with visual and interactive elements.

    If User experience is the bare bone, user interface wraps it up with an attractive cape.

    At YRC, our team if experts can help you develop the entire User Journey to ensure it is engaging!

    SAMPLING & PRODUCTION

    This step follows the “Designing” Phase, whether you have an in-house design team, freelance designers or an outsourced design company. It is one of the most exciting phases, as here you see your designs turning into products & your ideas turning into reality.

    In most start-up cases, production is outsourced i.e. brands tie-up with the established manufacturers/ job-workers to get their products manufactured.

    Sampling involves multiple 04 Stages, Fit-Sample, Prototype Sample, Pre-Production Sample & the Production Sample.

    Prototype Sample is the first sample provided to the buyer. It can be in any fabric/ colour. This sample is just to understand whether the product design looks equally great in reality.

    Fit Sample, as the name suggests is prepared to check the fit of the garment i.e. the various sizes, length, width etc.

    Pre-production is made by the actual production line. Here the stitching quality and other aspects related to manufacturing are checked. This is the last stage where rejection can be accepted.

    Production Sample is made before the production which is the replica of what is going to be finally produced.

    Once you are through with all this, you are good to go ahead & get your goods manufactured.

    PRODUCT DESIGNING / SOURCING

    Product Designing or Sourcing is the heart of the Ecommerce Fashion Brand.

    Product Designing / Sourcing can be done in several ways, as follows:

    • In-house Design Team
    • Freelance Designers
    • Outsourced Design Team
    • Ready Product Sourcing (From Manufacturer or Wholesaler)

    At YRC, we evaluate your business strategy & business model to arrive at the decision, which of the above ways would be best-fit for your business. In certain cases, product sourcing may be a combination of the above.

    These are the people who are going to build your brand! Whether they are the designers or merchandiser, your brand look is going to be in their hands.

    If you are designing each garment from the scratch, the sourcing would play crucial role in developing design identity of your brand.

    Sourcing includes fabric, trims, lining & all the raw material required to build the garment.

    BRANDING

    Branding is the “Look of the Brand”, right from logo to tagline, the colours used, the brand story, the brand communications on social media, the packaging & all the other aspects which speak directly or indirectly to the customers. Branding constitutes the look & feel of the brand & hence must be thoughtfully planned to match with the product that we are selling.

    Branding must appeal to our target audience. Example : A golden colour logo depicting finesse, art, richness, premium, however beautiful it may be individually cannot go with a brand selling affordable kids wear products. So, your logo must be in-line with your brand positioning, whether you are an expensive brand or a luxury brand or a value for money brand, it must be depicted from your “Branding”.

    It is an integral part to attract the target audience.

    ORGANOGRAMS & SOP’s

    Organogram is the “HR Blueprint” of the business which is created at the onset, to map out the team required across each function at various stages of the business. At the launch, only key people need to be got on board to ensure the project gets started & at this stage, all of them need to multi-task. Similarly, certain financial as well as operational goals are set for addition of the further team. Example, for the operations team, we hire 1 operations manager during the pre-launch phase & we add 1 more only when the business kicks-off & we reach a volume of selling more than 1000 pcs/ month or a turnover of more than 0.1 million USD.

    SOPs are Standard Operating Procedures, a bible to run the entire organization right from Sales, Purchase, HR, Order receiving to Order fulfilment, Inventory Management, Accounts, Warehouse, Logistics, Supply Chain, Production & all the other relevant functions for the business. Business must be organized from its first day of operations; only then the tasks can be delegated.

    At YRC, we design the organization structure, the processes, and approximate time taken to execute each process, job profile of every member within the organization, their KRAs, KPIs & the Reporting Structure.

    CRITICAL PATHWAY

    Critical Pathway Analysis (CPA), is a project management technique which cannot be overlooked while launching an ecommerce fashion brand. Brand launch process is cumbersome with multiple inter-dependent & time-bound tasks involved, which need to be tracked to ensure the project remains on track.

    CPA outlines key tasks across the project, their turnaround time (TAT) & the dependencies of tasks upon each other. It identifies the sequence of tasks, their interdependent steps from inception to completion, their criticalities, and their dates of onset, target dates of completion along with the key responsible person for the respective activities. Critical Pathway helps in understanding the unimportant & not urgent tasks which may jeopardize the execution of the project because of an unexpected snag! It also maps out the potential bottlenecks which might be posed because of the dependencies of tasks upon each other & cases where the next task cannot be commenced before the completion of the previous one.

    CPA detects the minimum & the maximum time involvement of a particular individual or team to execute the task, thereby arriving at the overall deadlines associated with the project.

    At Your Retail Coach, we design the Critical Pathway & review it periodically to ensure the project is on track & the progress is measurable.

    BUSINESS STRATEGY & BUSINESS PLAN

    Business Strategy includes the vision, mission, goals, business model, business plan & strategy for all the functions within the organization.

    Business Strategy is a well-defined plan that outlines who, what, where, why, how & when for the company; for example, who would be the target market, how to attract the target audience, when to launch new products, where to operate from, how to handle competitors, what would be the USP, what would be long term goal of the organization & several other answers to the 5Ws of Strategy.

    Business Strategy aligns the organization towards a common goal. Business SWOT helps company to identify & overcome their weaknesses & focus to sharpen the strengths. Business strategy forecasts future risks and helps business in building skillsets to overcome the potential threats.

    YRC’s Business Plan focuses on creating a “Blueprint” of the business, thereby deriving the feasibility of the concept & gauge whether the opportunity is lucrative to invest time, energy & effort. Business Plan creates cash flow understanding i.e. building inflow & outflow cash projections from Week zero to week 60 i.e. 05 year projection. Business Plan calculates the capital investment, operating costs, one-time costs, recurring costs & all the other numbers relevant to obtain the breakeven sales, return on investment, return on capital, internal rate of return & several other ratios. Business Plan is also one of the important requirements if you are targeting the “Investor Route”. Fund raising becomes extremely transparent & channelized. With business plan panned out clearly, the business will know until what point must it be stretched & where to stop, which reduces the probability of unplanned investments.

    MARKET RESEARCH

    Starting the concept of Ecommerce Fashion brand with Market Research ensures we get detailed understanding of the industry & this research report also acts as a social confirmation for your concept. Market Research helps in understanding the target locations, their population, potential online buyers for your product, competitors for each category, and top selling products of the competitors, competitors’ price range, offers & their responses & much more. Market Research helps in thorough understanding of your brand position as compared to our competitors. It helps in identifying gaps in the market, in your category along with the scope of the said product in the desired market. This will help in validation of your concept & prevents you from making the same mistakes as your fellow brands, eventually saving your time, energy & efforts. This phase is also a make or a break phase, as the market research study may at-times come up with some eye-popping numbers & statistics which might compel you to re-think on your product or category that you are planning to sell or alter your entire concept itself!! Market Research Reports analyse the competitors’ webstore for their traffic, conversion & sales. This is extremely valuable information to derive our inventory budgets & projections, which takes us to our next phase.