How Pharmapets lifted cross-sell conversion to 72% and order value by 17%
Customer Success In Numbers
Pharmapets set out to stay relevant at every stage of the customer relationship. Working with its ecommerce partner Studio Emma, it put Hello Retail’s Search, Retail Media and Recommendations to work across all three shops, with its own team keeping control. The results speak for the approach.
About Pharmapets
Pharmapets is a specialist online pet-health and pharmacy retailer in Belgium, part of the Barq Europe group alongside VetoStore and Tom & Co. It’s a demanding catalog: veterinary and medically-specific nutrition, thousands of product variants, three shops and multiple languages. The marketing team knows its products and customers inside out, and wanted personalization it could shape and control itself.
The challenge
For Pharmapets and Tom & Co, relevance has to hold up across a customer’s whole life with their pet, not just one visit. The puppy owner buying training treats today needs adult food, and maybe joint supplements, a few years from now. A shopper who reorders the same food every month is a natural fit for a subscription, but only if it’s offered at the moment that’s obvious to them. And once someone subscribes, the relationship can’t go quiet: subscribers still need reasons to come back to the webshop, the app, and the stores.
Its earlier setup was static. Search couldn’t carry what a shopper had already browsed, promotions couldn’t be tied to the moment, and product recommendations stayed generic.
Meeting that across a large, multilingual catalog came down to four things:
- Help every customer find the right product, even though everyone searches in their own words
- Promote house brands, supplier campaigns and subscriptions in a way that stays helpful, never pushy
- Grow order value with suggestions that are genuinely relevant, at the right moment
- Keep full control of the logic, essential when the catalog includes medical and veterinary nutrition
What Pharmapets built with Hello Retail
Search that understands intent
Synonyms, redirects and product boosts make sure the right products surface however a customer phrases a query, and results adapt to each shopper’s browsing history.
Pharmapets’ personalized search, surfacing relevant products based on the shopper’s browsing history.
Every customer searches differently. We make sure the right products come to the front.
Retail Media that promotes without pushing
Banners are triggered by the search term, so a shopper looking for dog food sees relevant dog promotions. The team also places its own house brand beside the A-brand equivalent, letting customers compare value side by side.
Example of presenting relevant Retail Media Banners triggered by the search term
Retail Media helps us push relevant content without being pushy.
Recommendations at the moment that counts
A cross-sell recommendation appears the moment a product is added to the cart, when buying intent is highest. A flexible waterfall keeps the team in full control of complex rules, including medically-specific nutrition.
The cart cross-sell recommendation, shown the moment a product is added to the cart.
How Hello Retail and Studio Emma built it together
Pharmapets went live in phases with Studio Emma, its ecommerce partner since 2013.
Search first, then Retail Media, then Recommendations. Instead of a standard install, the two development teams worked side by side, matching what the technology could do to what the business wanted to achieve. When the shops’ configurable products needed a custom setup, they built it together rather than settling for the default.
The division of labour is clear. Hello Retail provides the rule engine that decides which products and recommendations to show, and when. Studio Emma manages that engine, integrates it deeply into the commerce platform, and connects it across the different customer touchpoints.
That let personalization reach far beyond search and the cart. It now runs through the whole journey, including:
- Personalized zones on the homepage and in the header
- The customer’s preferred store and saved loyalty points
- A subscription’s next delivery date and the pet profile
- Product recommendations, including inside subscription management
- Suggestions in the add-to-cart pop-up
Bringing data, rules, customer context and product recommendations together at the right moment makes the experience feel more relevant to the shopper, and it feeds conversion, loyalty and customer lifetime value. Throughout, the setup keeps the Pharmapets and Tom & Co team in control of the rules and zones, so they can respond quickly to new campaigns, customer segments, pet life stages and commercial priorities.
What’s next
Pharmapets is extending personalization to product-page recommendations, and then to personalized category and content pages, showing each customer the products, categories and content that fit them best.