AutoPets: Ensuring cat parents never scoop litter again
Engineer Brad Baxter founded AutoPets in 1999 after inheriting two cats and experiencing firsthand what an unpleasant task it is to scoop cat litter. He designed an automatic, self-cleaning litter box that freed cat parents from the hassle of scooping litter, thus allowing them to spend more time with their cats. AutoPets’ flagship product, Litter-Robot, automatically separates cat waste from the clean litter, depositing it into a large carbon-filtered waste drawer with a plastic bag, which in turn can be easily disposed. The product is a win-win for both cats and pet parents: cats get to use a clean litter box every time; cat parents save time by not having to scoop, save money by using less cat litter, and free themselves from a smelly, unpleasant chore, enjoying a cleaner household in the process. The company has continued to build on Litter-Robot’s success (300,000 customers and counting) by introducing new products and services, including Litterbox.com, a premium subscription litter service.
Business Challenge: Seeking solutions to improve customer experience
AutoPets sells Litter-Robots exclusively through its own website: www.litter-robot.com. It is a company that constantly listens to customers to improve its products and to simplify the way customers access and purchase its products. As one of the ways to improve its customers’ online experience, AutoPets sought to offer alternative payment options, including Amazon Pay. Adopting Amazon Pay was a breeze as a pre-built offering through Magento (AutoPets’ ecommerce shopping cart solution). This seamless integration helped AutoPets go live with Amazon Pay in 20 minutes.
Business Impact: Faster checkout, increased customer trust, less time spent on fraud detection, access to Amazon innovation
AutoPets observed immediate results with Amazon Pay. At inception in August 2017, Amazon Pay orders constituted 15% of all orders on AutoPets. That number has now more than doubled to 35%. AutoPets believes that such growth is due in part to the trust customers have in Amazon Pay. This trust is important for AutoPets, which sells products and services that have relatively higher order value. Overall, Amazon Pay enables AutoPets’ customers to purchase such high-value products and services with confidence and speed by using their familiar Amazon login credentials and the payment information stored in their Amazon account.
AutoPets also trusts Amazon Pay to bring in credible customers with fewer chances of returns/refunds and fraud. AutoPets spends hours every week reviewing every “high value” non-Amazon Pay transaction before fulfilment. On the other hand, it spends less than five minutes vetting Amazon Pay transactions because of its implicit trust in the reliability of the customer, as well as Amazon Pay’s fraud detection capabilities.
The pace of growth in Amazon Pay transactions mirrors the growing relationship between the two organizations. Amazon Pay’s team has proactively reached out to identify innovative marketing and product opportunities that further enhance AutoPets’ customer experience.
As an e-commerce business that sells its product exclusively through its own website, our partnership with Amazon Pay has had a huge impact on our continued business growth. With about 1 in 3 Litter-Robot customers choosing Amazon Pay as their preferred payment option, we continue expanding our partnership with Amazon Pay to create the best user experience.
– Jacob Zuppke, Executive Vice President and COO, AutoPets
Amazon Pay ran co-marketing campaigns with AutoPets for 12 days during the 2018 Holiday season, featured AutoPets products and its story on pay.amazon.com, and chose AutoPets to be one of the first businesses to be featured on its new Amazon Pay blog.
Amazon Pay also introduced AutoPets to an invitation-only program called Curator that utilized Amazon’s advertising capabilities. Curator used Amazon shopping insights to display relevant online advertisements to the right audience so that they landed on the Litter-Robot website. Not only did it drive new customers to Litter-Robot, it drove relevant customers with intent to purchase. The Curator program (run for a limited time) alone improved AutoPets’ order volume by an incremental 5%. From design to go-live, this advertising campaign took less than 20 hours to implement.
Recognizing that its customers are increasingly seeking a connected experience across channels, AutoPets is also expanding its relationship with Amazon (through Amazon Pay) by leveraging Alexa skills to notify its customers when the litter box is full or to reorder litter when it is getting low. AutoPets appreciates access to such Amazon product innovations through Amazon Pay.
The Amazon Pay team has been instrumental in the development of our new website and introducing us to future voice-connected, cross-channel user experience. We appreciate this partnership as it allows us to innovate and further improve our customer experience.
– Jacob Zuppke, Executive Vice President and COO, AutoPets
With customer obsession and experimentation being an integral part of Amazon Pay and AutoPets’ DNA, this relationship is bound to scale even greater heights.