PetsFirst eCommerce

PetsFirst started as a single pet retailer in Bangalore. In early 2023 I worked on the two Shopify storefronts that took the brand national.

The storefronts

PetsFirst Store (shop.petsfirst.care) is the main retail store. PetsFirst Pharmacy (pharmacy.petsfirst.care) sells pet medication under the same brand. They’re separate Shopify stores with separate catalogues, so medicines do not appear between toys and food.

Both run on a paid theme that has been customised a long way from its default: hundreds of snippets, custom sections for breed pages, grooming, super deals and the pharmacy, and a stylesheet of nearly 8,000 lines. The two stores share that code. Only eight files differ between them, the settings, one stylesheet and a few templates, so the stores look and behave like one brand and a change made once reaches both.

Login, payments, shipping

On a phone, an email and password form loses people. So customers sign in with their phone number and a one-time code. That is an app on top of Shopify’s normal customer accounts: after the code is confirmed it signs the customer in through the standard form in the background, and if the app is ever switched off, the theme falls back to email and password.

Razorpay handles payments at checkout, configured for the methods Indian customers use. Shiprocket handles delivery across the country, with order tracking linked from the header. Customers who buy in volume get tiered pricing through a discount app.

Search

The other big piece of work was SEO, and most of it was small changes in the theme:

• One canonical URL per collection, so tag, filter and sort URLs do not compete with the main collection page.
• noindex on the helper pages the theme uses for popup content, which would otherwise show up in search as thin pages.
• Landing pages by breed, because pet parents search for “food for husky”, not “dog food”: pugs, huskies, German shepherds, golden retrievers, shih tzus, Indian breeds and boxers.
• A rich text section at the bottom of collection pages, so a grid of products has words for search engines to read.
• Structured data for products with an offer per variant, and for the organisation and site search.

That brought in more than 10,000 organic users in the first ten weeks, and over 600 customer reviews followed.

Results

In the eight weeks after launch, orders grew 15x and sales 23x, and the brand went from one city to more than twenty.

My role

The Shopify build for both storefronts: the theme customisation, the login and pricing setup, the Razorpay and Shiprocket integrations, and the SEO and launch plan. I wrote about the priorities in the setup behind PetsFirst’s 15x order growth.