Pet owners have a huge responsibility for their pets, and they need a place to buy pet supplies. Starting a pet supply business is a great way to dip your toe into the world of business, and with the global COVID-19 situation, people are closer to their pets now more than ever. Whether you’re new to running a business or an industry veteran, here are a few ways you can jumpstart your new pet supply business in 2020.
Selling Pet Supplies
Dog food and cat food are easy enough to buy and sell, but some extra effort might be needed if you want to stand out from the competition. One good, albeit difficult, strategy to start out with would be to try to find a reliable niche that isn’t already being filled in one way or another already. If you can reliably serve a consumer base of returning customers, you’ll have a steady source of income to work with as you expand your business.
Using a “direct sales” method is one way to do this, as it allows you to manually build rapport between you and potential customers as you try to sell them pet supplies direct sales products. Having an online store might not be a bad idea, either, as it allows you to spend more time on customer fulfillment and building a presence online. Regardless of the business model that you choose, the most important thing is that you deliver a quality product that your customers will enjoy.
Search Engine Optimization
Maintaining an online presence isn’t easy, but it can really boost your marketing efforts. Google searches are designed to give the most relevant search results possible. Modifying your webpage to meet the criteria required to increase its search ranking is called search engine optimization, and it’s not as straightforward as you might expect. There are two main components to optimizing your search ranking: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is determined by elements that exist on any given web page, while off-page SEO refers to how other web pages interact with your web page.
One good way to boost SEO is to have a social media presence since social media tends to promote discussion of a number of different brands in a way that could improve your off-page SEO. If you aren’t interested in the more technical details of search engine optimization, gr0 is one company that can help you out with optimizing your web page as well should you need it. They have multiple growth strategies and content approaches that can work for any business.
Pet Care
Pet care goes beyond simply giving a pet food and water. Shots, collars, brushes, bowls, microchips, and sometimes even a cat GPS tracker can be used to keep a pet safe and happy at home. While the ability to provide shots might be outside the scope of many pet supply stores, even choosing to sell items as simple as leashes or pet food and water bowls might net you a few sales here and there.
Choosing to carry specialized pet toys for animals like rabbits or scratching posts for cats might not be a bad idea, but you should try to get a good idea of what kinds of pets your target audience owns before you choose to invest too heavily in any particular kind of pet care product. If you plan to expand the scope of your business toward the medical side of pet care, keeping some microchips handy would be a good idea as well since it’s common practice to get your pet chipped once they’re fixed. Once you get your business up and running more smoothly, you can choose to carry a wider variety of pet care products without risking your entire company to do it.
Furniture and Plants
Pets are going to interact with your furniture at some point, and the outcome can vary greatly even between two different pets of the same species and breed. There are many dogs and cats that will destroy your furniture or wreck your houseplants for one reason or another. A dog might find it enjoys digging in your plant’s dirt, and cat owners will often tell you that their cat might enjoy kneading its paws against your couch every so often.
With this in mind, it’s not all that unreasonable for pet owners to try to get pet-friendly house plants where they can if they want to decorate their home. Obviously, some pets are going to be more likely to interact with plants than others, but even then, some pet owners are going to want to know which plants are safe for their pets and which ones aren’t. If you plan on carrying house plants to sell, then keeping only one or two kinds in stock will often suffice, as they tend to be a peripheral purchase at best. Still, consider keeping a list of house plant species that are safe for pets on-hand in case anyone asks about it. Potentially notable pet-safe plants include the staghorn fern, peperomia, prayer plant, Swedish ivy, African violet, and indeed most succulents in general.
Marketing
If you’re interested in running a successful business, you’ll probably need to do some good old-fashioned marketing at some point. That is, paying for advertisements, product videography, or anything else that can tell people that your company exists. Many companies will want to conduct market research of some kind before committing a lot of money to a marketing campaign. You might consider offering a survey that asks what kinds of plants your customers prefer, for example, and if the answer comes up “orchid,” then you can put up an advertisement on your website’s main page about how orchids are pet-safe and low-maintenance house plants.
From snakes to fish, people are capable of taking care of a wide variety of animals at home. The trick is to figure out how to take care of them properly, and that’s where you come in as a pet supply merchant. Both in-person pet supply direct sales and online businesses selling their favorite pet food product line can agree that responsible pet ownership is important, and everyone should treat their animals with respect.
