Direct Pet Supplies: huge inventory of pet supplies at great prices

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ProductCart Case Study (12/2011): Direct Pet Supplies

About our Case Studies: We like taking a closer look at ProductCart-powered stores that particularly attracted our attention. Each case study contains information on how ProductCart was used, notes on who designed and customized the store (when applicable), and some comments by our staff.

About Direct Pet Supplies

Direct Pet Supplies offers a very wide selection of pet supplies for dogs, cats, salt and freshwater fish, reptiles, birds and more. With a catalog of over 18,000 products, store navigation becomes a very important part of the store design, and the company took advantage of many ProductCart features to allow visitors to easily locate products by browsing or searching the catalog.

Direct Pet SuppliesGeneral Store Information

Early Impact's first thoughts... The design is at the same time light & fun (thanks to the color scheme and the cute mascot that appears on many of the pages), but also very rational. The home page slider, and both the top and left-side navigation, all invite the visitor to browse by category, immediately making it clear that the store carries a vast array of pet supplies.

The top navigation (shown below), uses a full-width container that houses a featured product and a category image. These design elements make it much more visually appealing than a simple, long list of links would be.

Direct Pet Supplies: top navigation

How they customized ProductCart...

We asked Direct Pet Supplies to provide us with a list of things that they had customized to make ProductCart look and work the way they wanted (which happens to be one of the great advantages of using ProductCart vs. a hosted ecommerce solution!). Here is what they sent us:

  • Replaced 80% of the table structure with Divs and CSS.
  • Incorporated multiple content sliders on various pages
  • Added an empty top level category product fill feature: for example, "Dogs" (contains no products, only subcategories) > "Dog Toys" (contains products): products from "Dog Toys" are randomly picked and shown as "featured products" under the top-level category, without having to actually assign products to the top-level category.

Other interesting information

  • Customer service system used, if any: none
  • Email marketing system used, if any: MailUp
  • Payment gateway(s): Authorize.Net, PayPal, Google Checkout
  • Shipping provider(s): UPS
  • Other interesting facts about this store:

    "We incorporated the ProductCart ecommerce widget into the company's Facebook page and added a Facebook Like button at the product level when browsing the store." Harry Ellis | Next Horizon

Home Page

Direct Pet Supplies: home page

Early Impact's notes: Very nicely laid out. A good combination of images, product information, and banners/offers, without any of them overwhelming the others. Some of the banners rotate randomly to provide a fresh look on each visit. Store visitors have many different ways to dive deeper into the store catalog, which encourages them to click through.

Suggestion: consider adding some more text at the bottom of the page, to improve search engine friendliness.

Product Page

Direct Pet Supplies: product page

Early Impact's notes: many interface changes that fit well with the rest of the store design. We liked the category name and breadcrumbs, which become a colorful banner and house the next/previous product buttons too. We also liked to customization on the "Add to Cart" button and how cross-selling items were relocated in a column on the right side of the product details [note about this customization: this layout works only if the product details do not contain wide objects (e.g. images, embedded video, etc., which is why it is not the default layout in ProductCart].

Content Pages

Direct Pet Supplies: content pages

Early Impact's notes: Direct Pet Supplies takes advantage of the content management system built into ProductCart for informative pages such as the Customer Service section, and the area where they describe their Reward Points program [note: the ability to offer a Reward Points program is a default marketing feature in ProductCart].

Final thoughts

Excellent use of colors and images - together with a well thought-out layout - make this a very nice looking store. Simple, rational navigation makes it easy to find what you are looking for. Masterly use of CSS introduces changes to the default ProductCart look & feel that perfectly fit the overall store design. Direct Pet Supplies turns what could be a boring large catalog into a fun, user-friendly superstore of goodies for your pets.

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