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Your guide to Owning Your Customers

Download interviews with a variety of IndiePet members in response to a major brand’s expansion into Grocery

Read how retail members are converting customers to brands that meet their needs when previously favored brands have changed in ways that no longer align with their business goals. Want to share how you manage changes with other retail members? Use the link below.

  • I help the customer by knowing what other brands are in the marketplace (or in my store) that meet the specific needs of their pets. Most likely it may even be a superior product and by educating the consumer it is possible to move them to another brand.Description text goes here

  • We try to offer products that are either exclusive to our store or save our customers money. Unfortunately, with everyone having a smart phone or access to the internet, having products at relatively competitive prices is more difficult. We strive to offer the best possible customer service and experience to increase customer retention.

  • Here’s how I see it—we have two choices. We can keep resisting and stay analog, or we can dive in and harness our collective power in the online marketplace.

    The truth is, brands are making far more money through direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales. I recently spoke with a brand that shared their DTC channel accounts for 90% of their revenue, while in-store wholesale is less than 10%. That makes us irrelevant.

    It may already be too late for small independent shops, but we still have an opportunity to leverage our customer base both online and in-store. Right now, we’re just a launchpad for small brands that leave us the moment profit margins tell them to.

    That’s why I’m building www.PetShop.org—a free online platform for independent pet stores. Our customers love us and want to support us, but we need to offer the convenience of online shopping and doorstep delivery. This platform works like www.BookShop.org, ensuring a percentage of sales goes back to the referring brick-and-mortar store. But I going to need the help of IndiePet to make it happen.

    With a PetShop.org we could give brands a choice: join our online store and share a percentage of sales, or risk losing shelf space in our physical stores.

  • We listen to their needs, suggest alternatives based on inventory and offer to special order if possible

  • We identify closely aligned brands within the category and do a sku by sku comparison- often times creating a cheat sheet for store staff- if customer is feeding x, then y is a very good replacement.

    Also, we do not immediately ditch brands that abandon the Indie channel. We sku rationalize and we slowly convert customers.

  • Ownership provides staff direction on brands that are strategic partners. We closely choose several manufacturers that meet our food and nutrition standards and support our business goals and growth.

  • We transition our customers proactively to indie focused brands that meet their’s and their pets’ needs. We do this to ensure that pets are being fed species appropriate foods based on our high quality and transparency curation standards and to protect the business from revenue loss.

  • We remove the brands from our store and find our customers a similar, but better alternative.