After finishing a project for Mike earlier in the year, Memorial Funeral Urns, he came to us with another exciting idea. The pet side of his business, Pet Passages, has an eCommerce component that needed a refresh.
Mike has franchise owners across the country who receive an affiliate commission when customers order from their Pet Passages eCommerce location. The affiliate calculation and tracking process was a lot to handle, and he came to Nevis Technology for a simplified, streamlined solution, as well as an updated interface for the eCommerce store.
We updated the interface so that it’s easier for customers to navigate and so that it better matches the look of the rest of the Pet Passages website. This included figuring out a solution for calculating extra, conditional fees on products with engraving options. This complicated calculation ensures that customers are charged correctly when they select additional options. Pet Passages offers a variety of different products with engraving and photo upload options, which vary by product.
As a result, we implemented unique engraving and upload calculations on a per-product basis. Additionally, engraving options were set conditionally. For example, if a product has a front and back engraving option, but the customer only selects the front engraving option, only the text fields for a front engraving display. If they then select the back engraving option, additional text fields appear.
In addition to the storefront accessible by customers, the site also includes an online supply store with products the franchise owners need to run their businesses. We built out that functionality so that franchise owners can easily place orders online while making sure those products cannot be seen by customers.
Then, we implemented an affiliate tracking solution that automatically calculates the commission on an order for each franchise owner. And, it tracks how much each owner has made as well as how much they’re owed and if they’ve been paid. It also includes robust reporting that shows the total number of visits across all franchise sites, the total number of referrals, and how much has been made across all franchises.
Before this update, franchise owners were paid for their affiliate commissions via check, which was a manual and time-consuming process. Now, franchise owners can request and receive payments digitally, via either Stripe or PayPal. Franchise owners get their money faster, and it only takes the click of a button, so everyone wins.
Because there are franchise locations all around the country, there are different tax requirements per state. We set up a formula to determine tax calculations on a per franchise/per state basis so that customers are charged the correct tax amount depending on which store they order from.
Less than two weeks after launching, there have been more than 120,000 visits across the franchise sites. As a NevTec Hosting client, the sites are more than equipped to handle the extra traffic, without experiencing slowness or loading issues.
Mike has also reported that they’re collectively getting double the orders as they were before the update and that, on average, customers are spending more per order.
This could be in part to the feature we added that shows related products, encouraging customers to view other products they might also find helpful. In the future, we also have plans to add an upsell feature to the site, to make it even easier for customers to find what they need.
We love hearing that franchise owners and customers alike have complimented the new easy-to-use functionality of the site. We’re excited to see Pet Passages continue to grow and helping them along the way!
