PetCulture

Headless architecture

PetCulture uses a headless architecture, driven by a number of intertwining requirements around content management, customer relationship management, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 business logic.

This architecture - and its complexity - meant that Disco was one of many teams working together to design and implement the solution. Throughout the build, we were collaborating closely with fellow Shopify Plus partners MindArc, digital agencies Luminary and RedCrew, and of course the talented team at PetCulture themselves.

The final solution has customer identity managed by Auth0; content managed by Kentico and a custom Rails application; products, collections and checkout managed by Shopify Plus; and business logic driven by Dynamics 365.

Payment integration

A core requirement for PetCulture was the ability to bring the payment infrastructure and customer network of the $50-billion dollar Woolworths Group to the table within Shopify Plus.

Working closely with Shopify, the Woolworths payment team, and RedCrew, we designed and implemented a Shopify HPSDK solution to support WPay transactions on the Shopify platform, and defined a common adapter API framework to support PetCulture-specific features such as membership and auto-delivery grouping.

This adapter approach means WPay will be available to future Woolworths-driven Shopify projects with minimal development effort.

Memberships & auto-delivery

With WPay transaction support built in to the checkout, the second phase of Disco's involvement was to provide support for recurring transactions to the site.

PetCulture offers two types of recurring transactions, both of which are essential to its business model: memberships and auto-delivery. Memberships recur monthly or yearly, and offer customers various benefits such as free pet insurance or access to live chat with vets. Auto-delivery allows customers to create flexible subscriptions for their pets' needs, along with options like adding a one-off item or skipping their next order.

Submarine, Disco's bespoke payment platform, offers powerful membership and subscription functionality out of the box, so the majority of our work here was to extend the WPay integration work completed during Phase 1 into the Submarine product itself. Once that was done, we worked closely with the PetCulture UX team and Luminary on the design and implementation of the customer subscription management experience.