Scooch: Building an Online Platform for Devoted Pet Parents

Business environment

More and more pet owners are opting for online pet health services as the industry grows rapidly.

According to multiple stats, as much as 86% of pet owners in the US engage in online shopping for their pets. With up to 45% of American pet owners spending the same amount of money or more on their pets’ health care as they do on their own, overall Americans spend more than 100 billion on pet health per year.

There is stiff competition in the pet health segment, and those providers who offer non-standard digital solutions can gain an edge.

Project brief

Dogs are members of our families and should be treated accordingly. Period.

That’s how our patron Scooch sees its mission. Namely, “to provide our four-legged friends with a high level of proactive, personalized care, working closely with vets and nutritionists.”

Scooch offers best-in-class nutritional and dietary dog supplements. Their difference: they produce organic products with grain- and wheat-free scientifically proven ingredients in the form of dog-friendly meaty chews, not pills. (If you ever tried to feed meds to your pet, you understand how significantly this simplifies the procedure)

Their format - the subscription-based, delivered and billed monthly - supposes that pet parents can save up to 900$ each year on pet illness. With average annual expenses for a pet dog amount to about $1,480, you might consider this a nice dial.

We were happy to join up with Scooch at the stage of their transition from a simple ecommerce website towards becoming a fully fledged pet wellness platform.

Foremost, Scooch wanted to increase their Shopify store conversion by updating its design and implementing new features.

On top of this, they wanted to go beyond traditional vet visits by coming up with modernized development enhancements, such as a pet health dashboard with online vet recommendations to improve the health of dogs.

challenge

Developing a healthcare online platform that is user-friendly, secure, and capable of delivering precise reports and treatment recommendations is pretty daunting by default.

Fundamentally, we took on the challenge of making a “healthy” digital environment for caring dog lovers by getting the most out of the Shopify platform, which in our case was neither Advanced or Plus plan (which means with significant shortages in feature set).

This very circumstance in a way also predetermined for us a number of integration challenges.

We got our heads over how to seamlessly tie the Scooch website with the telemedicine external app, very important if not crucial for the Scooch project.

Our developers needed to create SSO (single sign on) between Shopify store and app to make sure that users will be flawlessly logged in on both systems. As it was mentioned before, basic Shopify plans have a rather rigid backend to implement new features. Which also meant possible complications in leveraging API requests.

Solution

As cute as the topic itself, the collaboration was a breeze to go through. Grinteq mentally matched with Scooch’s startup vibe by temperament and spirit.

Suitable experienced developers joined the client as a dedicated team in the nick of time. Scooch appreciated our flexibility and accessibility.

During the collaboration, we were sticking to the Agile methodology, communicating in Notion and Jira, with daily meetings and texting in Slack.

Grinteq’s Full-stack Developer: “The team was amazing, there was always a friendly and warm atmosphere. We spent as much time as necessary to receive the greatest quality of the product.”

Revamping the Shopify website

We improved UX by simplifying the site's menus and grouped relevant products and topics, assuring visitors can find the proper product quickly.

Grinteq’s dedicated team designed Upselling features with functionality that allows Scooch team to customize the upsell offers, track their performance, and analyze customer behavior. Which means targeted recommendations and promotions that drive more sales.

We also took on the duty of making the site as mobile-friendly as possible for 2023, ensuring a smooth user experience.

Furthermore, we came up with some tweaking of the Shopify theme to match the Scooch's pet-friendly image: updating the homepage and product page layouts.

Building Healthcare Dashboard

With Scooch's ambition to shift from an ecommerce website to an all-in pet healthcare wellness platform came the need to design comprehensive on-site functionality which would allow pet owners to track the health of their pet and the effectiveness of supplement consumption.

Our developers took a notable part in developing a health dashboard, both in front-end and back-end development. As well as implementing algorithms that customize treatment plans for each pet.

Health dashboard functionality incorporates the pet health tracking and scoring, as well as personalized vet tips based on that real data. With a series of quick virtual checkups, pet parents can identify potential conditions, and have a health overview with scores for each problem domain.

Our team also took part in developing a custom Scooch loyalty dashboard with a tier-rewards structure.

Integrations

Vidivet app

One of the key components of the dog healthcare platform, as Scooch saw it, was telemedicine. Namely, the ability of Scooch customers to instantly 24/7 contact vets and nutritionists, or get a personalized video response asap. Due to this, Scooch partnered with the time-tested Vidivet app. Our task was to seamlessly integrate both services.

We designed SSO between Shopify store and app to make sure that users will be logged in on both systems. Since our Shopify plan had some shortages in backend availability, we collaborated with the miniOrange team, leveraging their efficient SSO Shopify app.

Sendgrid platform

Also, to streamline and optimize Scooch’s email marketing and communications with customers, we integrated Sendgrid platform. Allowing Scooch to send on-brand, well-designed emails to customers, including password resets, receipts, and other personalized messages.

QA

To control the quality of code, we used industry-defining tools like Sentry and Storybook.

Impact

We were happy to support our friends from Scooch in their pivotal moment of transition from cute ecommerce website to ambitious, all-encompassing online platform for pet parents who really care.

Our goal was to deliver the optimal technical solution to reflect the Scooch’s business idea - one subscription that would cover pet’s healthcare end-to-end.

The upselling function developed by Grinteq resulted in a substantial increase in new orders. Overall, according to their A/B tests, Scooch observed a 22% rise in revenue.

Team augmentation on Shopify

7

+22%

Business environment

Project brief

Services

Tech