Store Strength Becomes Online Strength: Omnichannel as a Growth Driver

Food, litter, that favorite toy: Pet owners are always restocking. In the store around the corner, on the couch at night, or ordered on the go and picked up on the way home – everyday life decides where shopping happens.

A leading pet supplies retailer in Switzerland turns exactly that into its strength: stores and online are one business – with expanded Click & Collect and their loyalty program.

foobar Agency first supported the company in shaping its strategy. The guiding question: How does a previously largely isolated online business become a profitable growth driver? The answers demanded more than new technology – changed processes and more, better touchpoints with customers. And a platform flexible enough to carry all of it: selected together, built from the ground up by foobar Agency, live six months after the start of implementation.

The previous online store largely ran alongside the store business. For customers, this meant two separate shopping worlds; for the company, an online business that fell short of its potential.

The goal was growth for the business as a whole – driven by online and omnichannel. To get there, the two worlds had to come together: a simple, reliable shopping experience and processes connecting both.

The priorities came out of the joint strategy work: processes that interlock stores and online, and touchpoints that fit customers' everyday lives – expanded Click & Collect, the loyalty program across every path to purchase, reliable availability information.

This required a platform flexible enough to carry such changes. Together with the client, foobar Agency selected the software: commercetools as the commerce engine, Hygraph as the headless CMS, Algolia for search, and a Next.js frontend on Vercel – building blocks that can evolve independently without halting the whole.

During implementation, every decision followed one simple question: What makes shopping easier for pet owners – and what drives revenue?

Find fast, buy with confidence: Algolia makes the product range searchable and relevant, while the frontend delivers short loading times on every device – from the first search query to the completed checkout.

Reliably to go-live: short iterations, regular stakeholder demos, end-to-end test management, and prioritization by business criticality. What drives revenue came first at go-live.

Six months after the start of implementation, the new foundation was live – built from scratch on the foobar Accelerator. For the company, this means more than a new store: brick-and-mortar and online now work for the same business.

And that is what mattered most: the foundation for tomorrow's business.

“How does our direct business become a profitable growth driver?” – there is no off-the-shelf answer to this question. foobar Agency answers it with consulting and technology from one team: strategy work that defines what truly helps the business, a joint software selection – and an implementation that delivers.

foobar Agency has been implementing composable architectures with commercetools, headless CMS, and search platforms for retailers and manufacturers for years – the same architecture powers commerce platforms in furniture and consumer electronics retail. We know what works in projects like this because we do the work: with clear priorities, honest expectation management, and reliability all the way into operations.