Pet.co.nz

Delivering the best products, the best prices and the best shopping experience. 

For those whose families feature a feathered, furry, aquatic or hooved member, you might be familiar with Pet.co.nz. As an eCommerce-based pet store, Pet.co.nz know how much pets mean to their owners and that they truly are part of the family. Because of this, they’re dedicated to delivering the highest quality products for their customers at the best prices and a seamless shopping experience.

Pet.co.nz needed a helping hand to keep their existing website running, while their internal developer team focused on an upcoming migration. 

When it came to delivering a seamless shopping experience Pet.co.nz were encountering limitations with their current Symfony-based website. Symfony had been a great tool initially, but it wasn’t quite what they needed anymore, and new platforms more suited to Pet.co.nz were emerging. With planned migrations for a number of Petspiration’s brands, the attention of their internal developer team was needed there. Pet.co.nz needed to take a temporary backseat, but at the same time still needed the support to keep going until it was time to migrate.

What Petspiration needed was two developer teams - one to roll out the various platform migrations, and another to keep Pet.co.nz going until the team was ready to migrate it. This is where Pixel Fusion came into the picture.

The team immediately got stuck in. 

Diving right into the task at hand, Pixel set about familiarising themselves with pet.co.nz, getting to know the code and setting out to resolve the issues at hand, transforming the website into a product. Armed with extensive knowledge of Symfony, a streamlined approach, unmatched documentation skills and Jira, the team did just that. Tackling pesky auto-ship issues that would back up and bring orders to a halt, unravelling years of code and logic that had been stacked on top of each other, and eradicating bugs.

And they didn't stop there!

With these key issues resolved, and Pixel becoming more familiar with pet.co.nz, the conversation changed from “we need to fix this” to “let’s make this better.” Rather than dealing with problems as they encountered them, the two teams were able to think ahead. Working in tandem, they began to identify ways to improve the website, thinking outside the box and finding new ways to improve the overall shopping experience. 

404 not needed.

It wasn’t until Black Friday that the two realised how far the website had come, with the website smoothly handling the biggest Black Friday Pet.co.nz had experienced (so far)! In previous years, it was almost expected that the website would go down and an emergency maintenance page would need to be put up. But this year, even with the amount of traffic Black Friday sent their way, they hadn’t had to. This was thanks to the combined efforts of Pixel and the e-Commerce team, who had eliminated the bugs and stacked logic that would cause the website to slow and crash.

Now that Pet.co.nz is due for its migration, Pixel’s role has now moved to more of a supportive role - helping with migration tasks and moving across key components. But the help that has been provided over the last year has been immeasurable and it’s clear to see that Pet.co.nz was left in safe hands with Pixel Fusion, with the website not just being kept alive, but revived.