An online pet pharmacy where the prescription travels with the order

The prescription is the whole problem. A standard storefront knows about products, baskets and payments — it has no idea that a wormer needs a vet's sign-off, or which of a customer's three dogs it is for. Held outside the store, prescriptions arrive by email or post, sit in a separate inbox and get matched to orders by hand. Every manual match is a delay for the customer and a risk for the pharmacy.

Fulfilment is the second problem. Medicines need batch numbers recorded against what was sent, prescription items need to be picked and checked differently from a bag of cat litter, and parcels have to leave before the courier cut-off. Add Amazon and eBay on top, each with its own orders and stock, and a pet pharmacy can easily end up running three businesses from three screens. An owner whose medicine arrives late does not wait for the next order — they find another pharmacy.

One commerce core, extended rather than worked around. Pets, prescriptions, batches and dispatch live in the same SQL Server database as products and orders, so the storefront, the warehouse screens and the marketplace feeds always work from the same facts.

Technical highlights

• Prescriptions belong to a pet, not an inbox — customers upload a prescription file during checkout and answer one question: which pet is this for? The file is stored against that pet's profile and the order, accepted under prescription terms, and can split an order so non-prescription items ship straight away. Admin users view and print prescription strips beside the order, and a scheduled export writes new prescriptions out to file for the dispensary's records.

• Pet profiles that sell the next order — owners keep a profile for each animal, photo included. Reorder reminders at a frequency the owner chooses, one-click reorder from past orders and favourite items turn a one-off medicine purchase into a repeat one.

• A warehouse built into the admin — a custom WMS inside the store admin produces picking lists, scans orders by barcode, assigns medicine batch numbers from purchase orders, prints labels and exports dispatch to MetaPack. A cut-off countdown on the site tells customers exactly how long they have to order for same-day dispatch.

• One catalogue, three channels — ChannelAdvisor sync lists products on Amazon and eBay from the store's own catalogue and pulls marketplace orders back into the same fulfilment flow. Wholesaler integration with NVS exchanges stock, orders and batch data over scheduled FTP feeds.

• Search that filters by prescription — a Lucene-based search service, run out of process, gives autosuggest and attribute facets, and lets shoppers include or exclude prescription-only products in one click.

• Retention on autopilot — abandoned-basket emails after an hour, back-in-stock alerts, review requests after purchase, a loyalty points and refer-a-friend engine, MailChimp and Campaign Monitor lists, Feefo reviews and PredictiveIntent product recommendations all run from the platform without manual exports.

Before

• Prescriptions arrived separately and were matched to orders by hand

• Picking, batch records and labels kept apart from the store

• Marketplace orders and stock managed on each channel

• Repeat orders depended on the owner remembering

After

• Customers upload the prescription at checkout and assign it to a named pet

• Picking lists, batch numbers, labels and MetaPack dispatch run from the admin

• Amazon and eBay listed and fulfilled from one catalogue through ChannelAdvisor

• Reminders, reorder and basket emails bring owners back on a schedule