Case study: Can a B2B Pet Nutrition Brand Run on Shopify?

Learn how B2B pet nutrition companies can optimize Shopify’s customer account registration for a smooth sales experience for licensed veterinarians.

Company Profile

Company Name: Rayne Nutrition

Industry: Pet Nutrition

Size: 11-50 employees

Location: Kansas City, MO

Shopify Usage: Shopify Plus

Role Interviewed: Kevin Hoose, E-commerce and Marketing Manager

Challenge

Upon transitioning to Shopify, Rayne Nutrition was faced with a stark reality: Shopify’s native account registration system was unable to provide the access control or personalization their business needed to operate.

Rayne Nutrition couldn’t sell on Shopify until they found a solution that could:

1. Capture Detailed Data: Collect comprehensive information about pets and their veterinarians to validate prescriptions.
2. Support Complex Operations: Manage both direct-to-consumer sales and interactions with veterinary professionals within a single e-commerce platform.
3. Enhance Customer Experience: Provide a seamless and informative shopping experience for pet owners while collecting vital pet information.

“Helium is a critical part of our tech stack, we capture a lot more data than is available out of the box or in Shopify’s native account registration system.”

Solution

Customer Fields by Helium is the key that allows Rayne Nutrition to capture essential data through custom fields on its registration form. Its unique business model requires capturing metadata during registration to manage subscriptions.

“With our Helium Customer Fields integration, we capture vet name, vet info, pet name, et cetera.”

1. Custom Field Creation: Rayne Nutrition gathers specific information about pets, their health needs, and their veterinarians during account registration.
2. Event Lead Capture: Utilizing Customer Fields forms at veterinary conferences and trade shows enabled efficient lead generation and data capture directly into Shopify.
3. Subscription Management Support: Although not directly integrated with Customer Fields, the importance of managing subscriptions highlighted the need for robust data management to support recurring orders.

Results

The implementation of Customer Fields allowed Rayne Nutrition with several tangible benefits:

Business Model Efficacy

The app has been instrumental in allowing Rayne Nutrition to ensure that diet recommendations are verified with veterinarians before any prescription is sent.

“We couldn’t do what we do as a veterinary-exclusive nutrition company if we didn’t have Customer Fields.”

Time Savings

The detailed data capture has reduced the need for manual verification and clarification by the customer service team, significantly streamlining operations.

“It cut down on 80-95% of our Customer Care team’s manual account verification.”

Seamless Lead Capture from Event Marketing

The ability to create custom forms in Customer Fields makes it a great tool to capture potential customers and save those leads directly into Shopify, which has opened opportunities for personalized marketing.

“We do a lot of events and vet conferences and for the lead generation capture we just create a custom form.”

Wrapping up

“If say tomorrow, we decided to add pet weight to everyone’s account, we can email people with feeding and portion control type content. We can’t do that natively with Shopify. That ability is for sure the best part!”

Rayne Nutrition’s use of Customer Fields has been an enabling foundation to its unique business model within the Shopify ecosystem. Rayne Nutrition’s use of Customer Fields underscores the importance of flexible and powerful customer registration tools for businesses with specialized needs in the e-commerce landscape.