eTailer of the week VetnPetDirect.com.au
This weeks eTailer of the week is VetnPetdirect.com.au - a little Aussie business that proves you can start-up and grow an online shop
to be a global success even from a regional location like Beaudesert in south east Queensland. 
From humble beginnings with an eBay presence in 2005, company founder - Belinda Geissler and her veterinarian husband have developed VetnPetDirect as a stand alone online shop with customers all over the world.
Geissler told eCommerce Report that continually reviewing how the web-site works and looks from a customers’ point of view has been a key to success.
“I am an "experienced" online shopper myself. I knew at the outset how I wanted our website to look and feel.
At the time when we started a lot of new sites were really over the top in terms of graphics etc.
They were very pretty, but also very distracting from a customers point of view."
"At the end of the day any store is about sales... if customers are getting lost in amongst the special effects then the sales conversion is going to suffer.”
She said that the business is now big enough to have outgrown its original procedures and software and the online shop will soon be
substantially upgraded.
“The new store will integrate seamlessly with our back end procedures and eliminate a number of manual steps which have just become too onerous given the volume of transactions we are now processing.”
VetnPetDirect operates sites under both a dot com and dot.com.au domain names. And the customer testimonials on the site clearly indicate the business has a number of international customers.
However Geissler said that majority of customers are in Australia.
Asked about how people like to pay she said that the company uses a NetRegistry gateway for credit-card payments but PayPal was increasingly popular.
“Ďt was originally mainly just international customers using PayPal” she said “but now we find as many as 30% of our Australian customers are using it.
Direct deposit payments via Internet banking were also surprisingly popular, she added.
Geissler said that VetnPetDirect is not a drop-shipping operation and instead ships deliveries from its own warehouse, using Australia Post as its freight carrier
“We like to stock a lot of unique products and products from smaller suppliers who can’t do drop-shipping. So we have to have our own warehouse.”
“ We’ve got around 4,500 different products that we stock, and many of those products come in various sizes of bottles or containers, so the actual number of stock items is much larger.”
On the marketing side Geisller said that VetnPetdirect has a mail order catalogue that mails a couple of times a year to all of its Australian customers. And the business is also a regular print advertiser.
Online marketing is a lesser part of the mix.
“We do a little online marketing with a few banner ads here and there, we are also part of an affiliate program, and [we also use] paid search / shopping comparison sites.”
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is also a high priority for the business, said Geissler. But she was emphatic that VetnPetDirect is only interested in high search engine rankings that have been honestly earned.
Personally I find it very frustrating doing a google search for something and then having to wade through hundreds of irrelevant results.
“ Thats one thing about our site... we are honest. Testimonials are real, product reviews are real. "Customers who bought this also bought" recommendations are also real. Text etc from our site that may rank us for search engines is real. We actually try and include relevant information in for all of our products for the benefit of the customer. So yes we have done a little work with SEO consultants and will probably do so in the future, but we want to keep it real. “
Geissler said that the business had certainly exceeded her expectations as to how fast it would grow and indeed had grown at such a rapid rate that it had been difficult to keep up at times.
Even so VetnPetDirect is gearing up for yet further growth, regardless of increasing competition.
“We don't worry a real lot about what our competition is doing and in fact it seems that new sites pop up like mushrooms overnight and then are gone again just as quick. Of course we keep an eye on what's happening around us, but our main focus is on aggressively growing our own business, expanding our product range so we appeal to an even greater audience and of course looking after our existing customers the best that we possibly can.”
For more information go to >
www.vetnpetdirect.com.au
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