Pets at Home has launched a Pet Care iPhone/iPad/iTouch application as its first foray into m-commerce and grows the company’s recent ‘Click and Collect’ multi-channel initiative. The app has been developed by BT Expedite and integrated into the existing Pets at Home multichannel architecture.
The app offers the usual news and offers from the retailer, as well as letting the pet owner keep track of important pet-related dates, such as vet visits and inoculations. It also offers advice and tips on helping pet owners care for their pets by keeping their details all in one place and allows the user to keep a diary of a pet’s life and deeds, along with facilitating the upload of photos to Facebook.
Matt Stead, Pets at Home Director of Multi-Channel says: “We are committed to interacting with our customers using all the latest technologies. The new app gives us an additional way to learn more about our customers and their pets. It gives us the ability to provide those customers with relevant and targeted pet care information, specific offers and event information. In addition, the app provides pet owners a single place to store their pet details, photos, vet info, the ability to share messages, notes and photos with their friends through the social element.”
Pets at Home is one of the first retailers in the UK to use BT’s Virtual Data Centre (VDC) to run BT Expedite’s iPhone application. Using a VDC means the retailer has the optimum processing capacity available at any time. It can grow and shrink with their needs, but they only pay for the processing power that they actually use.
Steve Thomas, BT Expedite’s CTO commented “Working with Pets at Home has been great. We both had a vision to deliver something that was both fun and useful for their customers and we set ourselves very aggressive delivery timescales. The investment we have made over the last two years to deliver our “Integrated Store” multi-channel platform has allowed us to deliver the Pets at Home app in a very agile way. The interesting piece for the team has been ensuring the back end infrastructure behind the app is reliable and scalable to meet any future usage patterns. To enable us to do this we have deployed the app into BT’s VDC cloud infrastructure, this gives us the ability to scale very quickly according to demand whilst giving Pets at Home a cost effective and versatile means of delivering this new channel.”
Pets at Home has more than 270 stores across the UK offering great products, tips and advice to keep your pet happy and healthy. From specialist pet food to toys and training aids, there is everything a pet owner could wish for and more.
