Pet Circle: Redefining the pet ownership experience with data-led insights and fast last mile delivery
About Pet Circle
Pet Circle launched in Sydney in 2011, with a mission of bettering the lives of pets and pet parents. With more than 700 staff and four fulfillment centers in Australia, Pet Circle prides itself as the one-stop-shop for pet owners, delivering anything and everything for pets at the most affordable prices. They are backed by the VCs Airtree Ventures, Prysm Capital and TDM Growth Partners and received $125M of Series C funding in November 2022.
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About DoiT International
DoiT International is a Google Cloud partner that's on a mission to help some of the fastest growing, digitally savvy companies around the world harness public cloud technology and services. With a technology portfolio backed by multi-cloud expertise, DoiT operates across more than 70 countries, providing expert consultancy to help organizations optimize their tools and capabilities in the cloud.
Pet Circle used Google Cloud to rapidly scale its last mile delivery service and gain deeper insights around its customers and their pets to improve its overall customer experience.
Google Cloud results
- Leveraged CDP infrastructure to create a metropolitan last mile delivery fleet in less than 4 months, reducing standard delivery from 5 to 7 days to 1 to 2 days, above industry benchmarks
- Streamlines server management with Cloud Monitoring for consistency and simplicity
- Gains detailed customer insights with a CDP built upon BigQuery and CloudSQL to make quicker business decisions
- Helps expand business operations in a year from 2 fulfillment centers to 4 to be closer to customers, with insights from Looker
- Leverages Cloud Functions for more event-driven application to reduce business overheads and reinvest back into services
Supporting 2M+ website visitors monthly, with data
For many people, pets are family. Supporting over 700,000 pet parents across Australia with more than 13,500 unique products, Pet Circle is arguably the largest online pet store in Australia. Its services extend beyond the sales of pet supplies, with a 24-hour complimentary vet chat available for anyone who needs support.
"We want to be the go-to place for pet families, whether it's dogs, cats, or horses, and even for the more exotic pets. So we're focused on having the biggest range of pet products in the country," says Denis Hoctor, CTO at Pet Circle.
A digital native company, Pet Circle has always been running in the cloud, but it was only in 2018 that the company migrated to Google Cloud, becoming one of the early adopters in Australia. "Data is really important to our business, and we felt that Google Cloud is the right provider for this. BigQuery, Vertex AI and related tools have helped us develop a powerful data environment that supports our business and customer facing applications. This has allowed us to scale our business quickly especially in the last year, including bringing on two new fulfillment centers in Perth and Brisbane, offering next day delivery in Sydney, launching our first privately owned delivery fleet and expanding our free online vet chat service to 24/7," says Hoctor.
"Data is really important to our business, and we felt that Google Cloud is the right provider for this. BigQuery, Vertex AI and related tools have helped us develop a powerful data environment that supports our business and customer facing applications."
—Denis Hoctor, CTO, Pet CircleEvolving backend processes with Google Cloud capabilities
The move to Google Cloud in 2018 was a lift and shift migration from a different cloud provider. "We had two big monoliths, a front office site stack that faced the customer, and a back office that operated the business as a bespoke Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software," explains Hoctor. They were all on static VMs, which didn't offer much flexibility.
Since the migration, the team at Pet Circle has been shifting towards a more elastic infrastructure with Cloud Functions, bringing in their own infrastructure as a code to take more control as they bring in increasing amounts of smaller services.
"Even our load balancers were all bespoke, so a lot of what we've done in moving to a more cloud native experience is to lean on Cloud Load Balancing, and where previously monitoring was all off stack, we're now using the Operations dashboards with Cloud Monitoring, so that there's more consistency and simplicity," says Hoctor. With a more streamlined way of managing its servers, Pet Circle is able to free up its engineering team for more headspace and time to create better products at speed.
Growing at scale with data-driven decisions
Whether it's looking for food supplies or general use products like litter or preventative treatments, Pet Circle relies on data to learn what customers are looking for to keep customers coming back. "We use data to ensure the operations of the business are running at scale efficiently and effectively," says Hoctor. "We're always striving to get better, and offer better prices, because everything gets reinvested in the customer."
On a mission to meet the needs of a growing customer base, with more than 2 million visitors to their website monthly, DevOps engineers leverage BigQuery and Cloud SQL where they have a customer data platform (CDP) for teams to operationalize data. "We’re working on better ways to manage our 'out of stocks' in the supply chain, so that we are always in stock everywhere across the country. That's been one of our greatest challenges post-Covid. But with data insights, we've been able to effectively expand from two locations to four, to have stock available closer to our customers," Hoctor says. "With the help of Looker, we were able to figure out the value that next-day deliveries can bring to customers. Based on that information, we decided to invest in building new facilities, including two new fulfillment centers, and expanding our dedicated metropolitan delivery fleet across Australia."
Data is also important for the team at Pet Circle to better connect with customers. "We're very interested in knowing who our customers' pets are, so that we can give accurate details when it comes to questions around their health and wellbeing, and give the right advice on products," says Hoctor. For example, the company is now in the process of fine-tuning its database to be more breed aware, in order to be more targeted and helpful in providing advice on a broader scale. At the same time, it also needs to be conscious of the boundaries when it comes to personally identifiable information (PII) as it can be a gray area when it comes to pets. "We have to be very mindful of things like customers' addresses and phone numbers, which we obviously have for deliveries. Keeping this secure is our priority, so we never use them for analysis. Rather, we use data in cohorts to keep individual customer data secure."
"With the help of Looker, we were able to figure out the value that next-day deliveries can bring to customers. Based on that information, we decided to invest in building new facilities, including two new fulfillment centers, and expanding our dedicated metropolitan delivery fleet across Australia."
—Denis Hoctor, CTO, Pet CircleBuilding an in-house delivery fleet with Google Cloud
Today, Pet Circle is working towards becoming a fully vertical business, which means creating their own metropolitan delivery fleet instead of relying on third-party logistics providers. During the height of the pandemic in March 2020, Pet Circle leveraged Google Cloud to develop a delivery platform to support the build of a dedicated metropolitan delivery fleet in less than four months. The new fleet bypassed jammed logistics networks and reduced customer delivery times from just over five days in March 2020 to one to two days in March 2022. The fleet now services around 89% of Metropolitan orders across Australia and Pet Circle has now launched its first privately owned and operated delivery fleet in Perth to have even more control of the delivery experience.
"In the past, once packages were sent, we didn't have any visibility on how they were handled and delivered. We want to have control right up to the doorstep of our customers," says Hoctor. For example, if a bag of dog food is delivered five meters in the wrong spot, Pet Circle will have that information, giving them the ability to increase the level of care for customers.
To build their last-mile delivery fleet, they integrated different API and SaaS based services with their own. With Cloud Functions, the team is able to run more event-driven applications, linking back to BigQuery for the data side of things. "When we do this right, the cost difference can be huge. We can go from hundreds or even thousands of dollars, down to just a few cents," says Hoctor.
Using Pub/Sub and Cloud Run, Pet Circle is not only changing their operations into a much more cost-effective one, but also scaling without needing to worry about back-end infrastructure and maintenance. "Basically, we've left the heavy lifting to Google Cloud, and by bringing in the right business logic, whether it's infrastructure as a code or application code, we can achieve the right value outcomes for the business and our customers," says Hoctor.
Delivering a bright future for pet owners
With so many changes to its infrastructure, Hoctor and his team are well on their way to paving the future not just within pet care, but also setting the stage for the wider ecommerce industry.
The team is now looking to expand and improve the range of delivery services offered, since not every customer has similar requirements when it comes to the speed of delivery. For example, some people may choose to set a regular cadence for deliveries like cat litter using Pet Circle's Auto-Delivery subscription, so they don't have to worry about replenishing it manually every month. But for more urgent things like preventative treatments where speed is of the essence, a different set of delivery options are required, like next-day delivery. Of course, there will also be regular delivery options that will take a few days, but at a more affordable cost.
"From our warehouses to our customers' doorsteps, we want to have full control so that we can give the best experience for pet families all across the country. With Google Cloud, we will continue to look at different ways to innovate and impact the speed of our network, to bring better value to our customers," says Hoctor.
"From our warehouses to customers' doorsteps, we want to have full control so that we can provide the best experience for pet families all across the country. With Google Cloud, we will continue to look at different ways to innovate and impact the speed of our network, to bring better value to our customers."
—Denis Hoctor, CTO, Pet CircleTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Pet Circle
Pet Circle launched in Sydney in 2011, with a mission of bettering the lives of pets and pet parents. With more than 700 staff and four fulfillment centers in Australia, Pet Circle prides itself as the one-stop-shop for pet owners, delivering anything and everything for pets at the most affordable prices. They are backed by the VCs Airtree Ventures, Prysm Capital and TDM Growth Partners and received $125M of Series C funding in November 2022.
About DoiT International
DoiT International is a Google Cloud partner that's on a mission to help some of the fastest growing, digitally savvy companies around the world harness public cloud technology and services. With a technology portfolio backed by multi-cloud expertise, DoiT operates across more than 70 countries, providing expert consultancy to help organizations optimize their tools and capabilities in the cloud.