Felmo, a modern pet care provider, upgrades its commerce engine.

Felmo’s business and tech teams were highly satisfied with their CMS, Statamic, which provided the speed and flexibility they needed for all their content needs. But their commerce engine, Snipcart, began to hinder their growth and affected daily operations.

Lightweight and easy to add, Snipcart proved that the online shop was a viable revenue source when first implemented, but it eventually limited Felmo’s growth potential. Their data model required each product page to be assigned a unique product ID in order to properly link a cart for that page. This resulted in duplicate product IDs for a single product, which would make running promotions and channel-specific discounts overly complicated. For example, running a Facebook-specific promotion on a specific Felmo product required the creation of a duplicate product page with a unique Product ID in order to apply the discount, complete checkout and track the promotion’s performance. A similar proliferation of SKUs codes arose for product options (again, due to the requirement of linking unique product IDs to specific pages). Downstream, this created operational issues when calculating stock and taxes in their 3PL and business intelligence tools, as SKU counts and orders would be spread across a multitude of product IDs.

Other pain points included limited payment gateways and carriers for the European market they served. Felmo wanted to address these limitations while avoiding a full replatform and the time, resources and opportunity cost that goes with it.

Felmo decided to swap out their current cart solution for Commerce Layer’s hosted checkout application as it would address their pain points quickly, provide greater alignment with their current CMS at the SKU level, and enable Felmo to expand their business, including new markets in the future.

Final stack

• Commerce Engine — Commerce Layer
• CMS — Statamic
• SSG — Laravel
• CDN — Cloudflare
• Payment Gateway — Adyen with Klarna (BNPL), credit cards, Sofort (bank transfer). Express checkout in near future.

One of the first benefits Felmo saw was through Commerce Layer’s flexible product data models. Since SKUs aren’t tied to pages, Felmo no longer had to worry about SKU data duplication, which immediately resolved data issues for their inventory and tax management. On top of that, Felmo can now create bundled products, offer subscriptions, cross-promote products on multiple pages, and measure a promotion’s effectiveness by marketing channel.

After four months, Felmo was fully operational with Commerce Layer’s hosted checkout, which is a React‑based, PCI & PSD2‑compliant, and production‑ready application built on top of Commerce Layer’s fully customizable commerce APIs. Its simple mobile-first UI and clean design satisfied Felmo’s needs, and it provided fast, streamlined, and secure checkout with payment options out of the box that were relevant to their region. Today, Felmo’s online store offers customers the option to pay via credit card through Adyen, BNPL through Klarna, bank transfers through Sofort, and Paypal. In the near future, express checkout using Google Pay and Apple Pay will be made available through the hosted solution.
Commerce Layer also eliminated the need for SKU data duplication and instead offered greater flexibility; Felmo can now create bundled products, offer subscriptions, cross-promote products on multiple pages and execute promotions and measure their effectiveness by marketing channel.

The online store has emerged as an important driver of their overall business, acquiring new customers through products sold online and in the process, building awareness for their core, mobile vet services. Marketing products that can be readily shipped throughout Germany creates greater marketing efficiency than capacity-constrained veterinary services.

Felmo’s ROAS increased 100%. Commerce Layer enabled Felmo to introduce a large range of products and combine them to create compelling offers. Easier integrations with MarTech tools, CRM automation and their overall ecosystem contributed to the efficiency of their marketing spend.

Commerce Layer also unlocked new commercial opportunities through product bundles and UTM triggered promotions. The flexibility and ease of setting up product bundles resulted in a 40% increase in average order value. Felmo can now execute channel-specific promotions without creating new landing pages, and can attribute ROI and ROAS accurately to improve marketing performance. Felmo could also merchandise their products throughout the site to their specifications.

Felmo further saw a 15% increase in conversion due to Commerce Layer’s flexible integration of the Adyen payment gateway as well as the natural integration of product placements throughout the customer journey.

Operationally, it was easy to integrate with Byrd, their 3PL, through webhooks. This was not previously possible with a SKU database full of duplicates. Today, Felmo’s fulfillment operations are fully automated. It was also easy to set up automated email flows using Commerce Layer’s webhooks. As a result, there was a 50% reduction in support inquiries and almost no complaints about operations (e.g. wrong product picked, longer delivery times, etc.).

As Felmo’s business continues to expand, Commerce Layer’s flexible commerce API will continue to support their goals. It will enable the addition of new markets, payment gateways and business models and provide the option to add customizations to the transaction experience.