How to Start an Online Pet Supplies Store

Umpteen people exist in this world who are pet lovers. Some are fond of dogs and cats, some like rabbits and hamsters while others prefer cattle and chickens. Not just animals, people also fondle and pet different types of birds like pigeons, parrots, doves, parakeets, etc.

So, that shows starting an online pet store isn’t a bad idea at all. But how to create an online pet store? That’s the question cropping up in your mind, right? No worries! This write-up will guide you comprehensively about how to create your online pet store.

In this write-up, I will provide you with the necessary tips and tricks not just to start an online pet supplies store but also to nail your store. Without further ado, let’s cut to the chase.

How to Start an Online Pet Supplies Store:

Unlike other online stores, starting a pet online supplies store is different. This is because pets are mainly animals and birds, so they have different requirements. The Pet business involves unique supplies of products. You can’t apply the same strategies that you apply for other online shops.

I will now share the golden tips to start an online pet supplies store. By following these tips and tricks, you can build a complete WooCommerce pet supplies store and avail ShopEngine as well.

Pick and Choose your Store’s Niche:

First and foremost, you have to make up your mind regarding the kinds of pet products you want to sell. You can either sell a broad category of pet products or even decide to sell specific types of pet products. That means you can keep your pet store’s niche broad and narrow both.

But I would suggest you to narrow down your store’s niche in order to maximize your sales and profit. For example, you can sell pet foods, pet toys, or pet apparel. You can even provide pet care services. The more you keep your niche narrow, the better it is.

How to choose your online pet store’s niche-

• Identify the pets you love no matter whether they are animals or birds or both
• Decide on the product categories you wish to sell
• Check out the trending pet products
• Prioritize low-cost and small-sized products for higher sales and lesser storage
• Don’t forget to check people’s reviews to filter out shoddy products

Figure out your Target audience:

Identifying your target audience is important as much as choosing a niche is. If picking a niche helps you select your product range and website design, figuring out your target audience will let you run your marketing campaigns in an optimal way.

When you know the location, age, gender, relationship status, and other demographic data, it becomes easier for you to advertise your products or services. You can launch your marketing campaigns targeting only them and create a higher chance of sales.

In order to better identify your target audience, you can conduct marketing research on pet spending country-wise. For example, in America, pet owners reportedly spend $1480 on average annually on dogs. When it comes to pet cats, their spending drops to $902 in a year.

Choose Pet Product Suppliers:

When it comes to getting pet products for your online store, you basically have 2 ways. Either buy from marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc. and resell them on your store or find and select a reliable wholesale supplier. This is of course in the case when you aren’t manufacturing pet products yourself.

In order to find pet product suppliers, you can take assistance from dropshipping marketplaces like AliExpress, Oberlo, and Doba. You can also visit supplier directories or aggregator sites to track down reliable suppliers. SaleHoo, Worldwide Brands, and Wholesale Central, to name a few.

Create and Finalize Product Range:

The next step is to create a catalog of pet products that you wish to sell in your online store. For that, you can conduct an analysis of Amazon’s best sellers which will provide you with an idea about the products you should go about. You can even invest your time in the analogs of Amazon like AliExpress and eBay.

You can also take advantage of tools like SaleHoo and the likes of it to compare pet products, giving you an idea about the products you should include in your store.

Set Pricing Policy for your Products:

This is an exceedingly crucial step especially for acing your pet product business. Setting random prices for your products is likely to put you on the back foot. So, carry out the necessary research before setting a pricing structure for your products. Take a deeper look at the pricing strategies of your competitors to get better insights.

Explore and come up with fruitful tactics to make your online store stand out. You can apply marketing gimmicks to lure your prospects. For example, you can set a price of $16.99 instead of $17 for a product as the human brain always looks for items at a lower price.

Keep things simple in pricing as buyers don’t want to fall into complexity. You shouldn’t price your products at something like $15.52 rather it should be $15.99. The latter pricing is more likely to grip buyers than the former due to its simplicity even though the second price shows up higher.

Additionally, make sure that you set **.99 pricing format for products that are low-cost. This is because, for pricey products, decimal points won’t look good. $7000 surely looks better and simpler than $6999.99. Lastly, don’t brush aside bundle offers and free shipping services, especially for expensive products.

Choose a Platform to Sell your Pet Products:

All the prerequisites are done! Now, it’s time to go ahead to sell your pet products online. However, a number of ways are there through which you can sell your pet products.

You can sell pet products in marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. The perks of selling products in these marketplaces are multifold. It’s low-cost, simple, and hassle-free to sell products in these marketplaces. In addition, you will get exposure to the huge customer base of these marketplaces.

But there are drawbacks to selling products through marketplaces too. You will hardly have any flexibility to set up your business process instead, you have to follow their guidelines and setup to run your business. On top of that, you have to share 5-30% profit with these marketplaces.

However, there is another way through which you can sell your pet products and that’s launching your own e-commerce website. And this is the best way and the core part of this write-up. Launching your own online store will provide you with more flexibility and let you stand out from your competitors.

You don’t even need to share your profit with any marketplace. In order to start an online pet supplies store, you can make use of a CMS like WordPress or e-commerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, etc. You can even choose to build your online store from scratch.

I would always suggest you to go for WordPress to create your pet online store as it’s easy to use, cheap, and highly customizable. In addition, you will get tons of plugins and addons to extend the functionalities of your online store like Elementor, WooCommerce, ElementsKit, ShopEngine, etc.

Pick a Domain Name:

The next thing to do is choose and buy a domain name for your pet supplies store. If you search for domain names online, you will get plenty of suggestions. But you have to come up with a catchy domain name to make your visitors and clients remember your brand for a longer period.

It’s easy to understand that the best domain names might have already been used. Hence, you have to think a bit creatively to get a fine domain name. Conduct research online to know which domains have already been used. This will ease your domain name hunting as your options will be limited then.

Always try to choose a domain name connecting with the pet products that you sell. Also, make sure that your domain name shows up simple, concise, and crisp to better connect with your audience. Lastly, don’t forget to register your domain name to make sure it belongs to you.

Choose a Hosting provider:

Along with choosing a domain name, you have to select a hosting provider to make your website live on the Internet. You have to rent space on a web host’s server for your website, either monthly or yearly.

With your website hosted on a server, it will be visible on the Internet. And your visitors can access the store by typing the domain on search engines.

Scores of hosting providers are on hand to take service from. Some of the popular ones include Bluehost, Hostgator, Hostinger, GoDaddy, Namecheap, Siteground, InMotion, etc.

Design your Pet Website:

Done with buying the domain and hosting! Now, it’s time to move ahead to design your pet online store. If you are a layman, I wouldn’t suggest you to design the online pet store yourself. Instead, I would recommend you to hire an expert web designer to get professional results.

But don’t just blindly hire a web designer rather do your homework before you finalize anyone for the job. Ask for the portfolio of web designers you shortlist and look at their previous works. This will ease your hunt to track down the fitting web designer.

Also, don’t hesitate to take a look at the competitors’ site designs to get a holistic idea about online pet stores. Remember to keep your website clean, catchy, and easy to navigate. Make sure that your website is attractive, interactive, and informative to make a real difference.

How to Design your Pet Supplies Store with ShopEngine:

If you are a WooCommerce user, you can make use of a premium WooCommerce plugin “ShopEngine” to design your pet store comprehensively and optimally.

In this write-up, I will just show the process of designing the shop page of a pet supplies online store with ShopEngine in a nutshell. So, let’s check out the process-

Install WooCommerce and Elementor:

ShopEngine is a WooCommerce builder for Elementor. So, you have to install both WooCommerce and Elementor plugins before using ShopEngine.

Install ShopEngine:

Once you are done installing WooCommerce and Elementor, go ahead to install the free version of ShopEngine. To make use of the advanced features of ShopEngine, you can even install ShopEngine Pro.

Add your Shop Page Products:

Now, go to the dashboard and navigate to Products. From there, click “Add New” and then add your shop page products to your WooCommerce pet supplies store.

Design Shop Page Template and Switch to the Elementor Window:

Now, navigate to ShopEngine and click “Builder Template” to go ahead to create your shop page. Make sure to set your template name and select template type as “Shop”.

Enable the “Set Default” toggle and choose custom template design. Finally, save the changes and click “Edit with Elementor” button to switch to the Elementor window.

Design your Shop Page:

Now, it’s time to design your pet supplies shop page. Drag and drop the necessary widgets from the left widget area. In this process, I will just add “Archive Title” and “Product List” widgets to create the skeleton of the pet supplies shop page.

Preview and Publish the Page:

Finally, preview the shop page in the front-end. If everything looks good, publish the page in your WooCommerce website.

This is how you can create a checkout page, product page, pricing page, etc. of your pet supplies online store with ShopEngine easily and smoothly. And finally, your online pet supplies store will be up and running!

Launch a Mobile App for your Animal Store:

If you are smart enough, you shouldn’t just rely on your pet website. Instead, extend your range by creating a mobile app for your pet online store. A huge chunk of online users is active on mobiles.

Surely, a decent percentage of these users are pet lovers. And you wouldn’t want to miss out on these potential clients.

With a native app for your pet online store, you can grip those of your potential clients who don’t browse websites regularly. Like website design, you should hire an expert for mobile app development unless you are an expert yourself.

Set up Online Payment Processing:

As you will be dealing online, you have to set up a system to accept payments in exchange of selling your pet products. A number of payment platforms are available that you can leverage to accept payments from your clients. Some of them include PayPal, Payoneer, Stripe, and Skrill.

Kick off your Marketing Campaigns:

Your pet online store is up and running! But is it the end? Obviously, not! You might have created a fabulous pet online store with top-notch pet products. But unless you market your products properly, it won’t bring out any positive results. So, design your marketing plan immediately after creating your pet online store.

Plenty of ways are there that you can try to promote your pet products. Hire professional content writers to write regular blog posts on the pet niche. Prepare catchy images, infographics, and short videos to promote your pet products through social media.

On top of that, set a monthly budget for running paid ads for your business products on different platforms, including Google Adwords, Facebook, and YouTube. You can also stream live videos on platforms like Facebook and Youtube to circulate your pet products.

Key Takeaways:

Tons of commercial products are there to start a business with. But thinking to launch a pet supplies online store comes out of a sheer passion for animals, especially domestic animals. The basic requirements for creating an online store for pet products or any other products are identical.

But when you enter into the depth, you have to dedicatedly think about the pet products to successfully create your online pet shop. You have to carry out profound research, both online and offline to understand the market condition. Not just data-driven analysis, you have to also engage in innovative thinking to launch a stand-out pet online store.

To wind up, my suggestion is to start an online pet supplies store small as a low-risk approach and then you can gradually grow big. Once you reach a standard level, you can target to become an established pet brand globally! And don’t forget to take advantage of ShopEngine, the best WooCommerce builder!