How Pet Valu unified physical and digital experiences, accelerating time to market by 40%

For almost 50 years, Pet Valu has built trust and loyalty among pet parents by providing expert customer service, a curated selection of premium products and engaging in-store experiences. The company prides itself on the service provided by its store associates, called Animal Care Experts (ACEs), who provide devoted pet lovers with all the information they need to find the right products for their pets. 

However, this top-notch experience was lost in translation in digital format. Built on a legacy platform, Pet Valu struggled to provide seamless online shopping experiences that resonated with customers. 

More importantly, the platform’s limitations made it difficult to support Pet Valu’s omnichannel vision. Nadia Ahmed, Director of eCommerce, explained, “We struggled to replicate the in-store promotions on the website to the point where we often had to create promotional coupons manually. More complex or tiered offers really led to a poor customer experience.”

Operating across multiple brands in multiple regional markets, Pet Valu also faced challenges in making the right products and prices visible to the appropriate audiences. The rigid, monolithic architecture didn’t allow for easy localization of product catalogs, pricing or language preferences, making the digital shopping experience clunky and confusing for customers.

Despite having a skilled, tech-savvy development team, Pet Valu couldn’t move at the speed the market demanded due to the constraints of legacy tech. Making even minor updates and enhancements was time-consuming or hard to implement, leaving the company unable to adapt quickly to customer needs or promotional opportunities.

In addition to the operational and customer experience hurdles, the monolithic system imposed a high total cost of ownership (TCO). Pet Valu was locked into an expensive license agreement, annual upgrades and maintenance costs, while forced to pay for features the company didn’t use.

The tipping point for Pet Valu to accelerate its digital transformation came from customer and internal feedback alike. Store associates reported the lack of accurate, real-time data that prevented them from providing the standout experience customers came to know and love. 

Pet Valu needed more than a quick fix. As the company planned to expand its store footprint from 800+ to 1,200 nationwide and elevate its online presence, a future-ready commerce solution was a prerequisite to support its ambitious growth plans. 

As Tanbir Grover, Chief Marketing and Digital Officer, put it: “Pet Valu embarked on an eCommerce journey late to the game. We needed speed to market. We were under a tight deadline.”

Pet Valu’s digital transformation journey began with a clear vision for a unified experience, meeting our customers wherever they are, whether in store, online or anywhere in between. For the retailer, this meant eliminating silos and discrepancies between digital and physical channels, so they could deliver a cohesive experience no matter how or where customers engaged. 

The COVID-19 pandemic hit exactly when Pet Valu started its digital journey. After a few years leveraging a monolithic platform that proved too rigid and time-consuming for its needs, the company adopted a composable commerce model to modernize its infrastructure, improve performance and accelerate innovation.  

After a thorough evaluation, Pet Valu selected commercetools Composable Commerce for B2C as the cornerstone of its new commerce ecosystem. Drivers to choose commercetools included: 

• Drive faster time to market. Composable architecture enables Pet Valu’s team to piece together the capabilities they need and use their preferred vendors, such as Contentful for their CMS. 

• Ensure seamless site experiences with outstanding performance. With an average  <100 millisecond API response time, commercetools helps Pet Valu improve user experience, helping contribute to higher conversion rates.

• Orchestrate omnichannel shopping with a flexible promotions engine connecting online and offline channels seamlessly. This enables customers to get a coupon or discount provided in one channel and redeem it in another. The ability to quickly and easily tailor promotions to specific Canadian provinces was also a must-have. 

• Reduce TCO by removing the inefficiencies of legacy technologies, such as expensive licensing and upgrades.   

Recognizing the need for a strong implementation partner, Pet Valu partnered with Deloitte Digital Canada to lead the strategy and bring in the expertise for a successful transformation. Google Cloud was selected as the infrastructure partner, offering the scale, reliability and flexibility to support Pet Valu’s long-term ambitions. Google Cloud Marketplace provided rapid access to tools and services, further accelerating development and modernization.

For Pet Valu, switching to the composable model was transformative from day one. Tanbir Grover said, “Composable commerce is actually a really cool thing. In two sprints over four weeks, we were able to take a tax service and redeploy it using commercetools. In the old platform, that likely would have taken us six months.” 

When it came to implementation, the Pet Valu team adopted a “big bang” approach, replacing the legacy platform in one coordinated launch after a six-month discovery and planning phase. The transformation, however, extended beyond technology — it was a full organizational evolution. 

Pet Valu restructured its internal teams, creating cross-functional agile squads that included product owners, scrum masters, frontend and backend developers, as well as UX/UI designers. This new team model fostered ownership, speed and alignment with business goals. Director of Engineering and Delivery, Ryan Belitz emphasized: “I care deeply about building empowered engineering teams aligned to business outcomes. That means delivering high-quality results fast — without burning out our teams.”

Most business use case challenges were successfully addressed during the design and implementation phases. However, as the teams moved into User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and prepared for launch, they encountered a few issues related to promotions. While most promotional requirements were handled using commercetools’ out-of-the-box features, five edge use cases introduced technical debt and hindered the realization of a fully omnichannel experience at launch. 

To address the issue, Pet Valu, alongside Deloitte Canada and commercetools’ Solution Architects, built a comprehensive promotions playbook that aligned all stakeholders around common patterns, known pitfalls and best practices for testing. Ultimately, this led to smoother integrations and reduced the risks associated with go-lives. 

Pet Valu's profound transformation into a modern commerce organization brought valuable learnings along the way — insights that helped shape a foundation for rapid iteration, reduced risk and sustained innovation. By bringing engineering in-house and shifting to composable commerce, the company eliminated vendor lock-in, lowered TCO and created a centralized data architecture to support future personalization efforts. 

“It was a decision among business and tech to invest in composable commerce. And that in itself brought the teams together. It unified the experience,” shared Ryan Belitz, Director of Engineering and Delivery. “We work closely with product, marketing and business leaders to properly define the capabilities, features and functionality we want. And we needed speed to market, personalizations, centralized infrastructure and future scalability. That’s the key to unlocking everything we’re doing right now.” 

Pet Valu’s new enterprise-grade platform launch delivered immediate, measurable business impact — driving faster performance, higher conversions and seamless omnichannel shopping. As Tanbir Grover, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer, shared: “We launched this website and did not see a traffic drop — and we saw a conversion lift immediately. You can get through the website faster, find products faster, page load speed, cart, checkout… all those metrics have improved. As a result, conversion improved.”

The frontend performance benchmarks validated these gains. Using Google Lighthouse scores, the team recorded significant speed improvements over the previous technology stack, improving the speed for the homepage by 70% (10 seconds faster) and product detail pages (PDPs) by 45% (4.9 seconds faster). Equally important is that the platform proved resilient under pressure. The team reported zero downtime or performance degradation during high-traffic events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

One of the most impactful wins was the ability to unify in-store and online promotions. By using customer groups, the company can dynamically tailor promotions and pricing, enabling customers to see exclusive offers online that can be redeemed in-store, without requiring two systems behind the scenes. When an item is added to the cart, the backend reflects tailored pricing in real time. Plus, commercetools’ Merchant Center further automates discounts and promotions in a no-code business tool. 

With commercetools, the team could finally realize many features long requested by customers. Pet profiles, wishlists and curated experiences for key groups — such as seniors and animal shelters — were quickly rolled out. “We can create personalized experiences with our shelter program, which is a curated experience for our shelters where they can actually get a discount on some products,” explained Nadia Ahmed. “We weren’t able to do that before we had commercetools.” 

The shift to a composable approach also eliminated previous limitations around product availability. Previously, catalog access was tied to individual warehouses, restricting what customers could purchase from specific locations. Now, customers can browse and buy from the whole product catalog regardless of where they’re located, increasing customer satisfaction and generating sales opportunities for the company.

The agility and flexibility of composable commerce also reignited developer creativity and velocity. As Ryan Belitz shared, “Our teams are energized. They’re no longer boxed in by legacy systems. The creativity shift has happened where people are now starting to enjoy what they’re actually doing and you can see it in the work being delivered.”

Moreover, migrating to commercetools on Google Cloud brought additional operational benefits, as the team can scale resources instantly and precisely control cloud instances. Observability tools now track system health and performance, enabling proactive monitoring and self-healing workflows. CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) pipelines and a microservice-based architecture enable safe, incremental deployments with full rollback capabilities.

Unsurprisingly, the development cycle accelerated significantly. Features that once took months now launch in weeks. “We measure ourselves by speed to market,” said Nadia. “We’re now rolling out features 2–3x faster. Our time to market is 40% faster than before.”

The ability to decouple the frontend from the backend, as well as push pinpoint production and update feeds without dependencies, became vital for the retailer to scale innovation. “You control all your releases and take out the risk, so rollback strategies became easier,” said Rohan. “From a technical standpoint, we’ve truly embraced and adopted CI/CD along with automation. It’s become a core focus for us. We didn’t have a DevOps practice before we did this, and now we do.”

Ultimately, what started as a technology project set the stage for an evolution at Pet Valu. “What we’ve created is a living assembly line,” Rohan shared. “It’s people, process and technology working together. Composable commerce allows us to innovate without compromise.”