eCommerce Website Development for Pet Care Brands in the UAE

Imagine it is 11 p.m., and a customer is down to the last scoop of her pet’s food. She opens a pet care website, but it cannot tell her whether her usual bag is in stock or if it can arrive tomorrow. She sends a WhatsApp message to ask. Nobody answers. By morning, she had ordered from another store that gave her both answers in seconds.

If you don’t want to lose customers like this, your website has to answer those questions on its own. A good eCommerce website for a pet brand shows live stock and delivery estimates on every product page, and lets customers reorder their regular food in one tap.

Signs Your Pet Care Brand Has Outgrown Its Website

Manual Order Entry

Orders arrive by message and phone, and each one gets copied into a spreadsheet or your ERP manually. This can cause a wrong SKU or a missed delivery.

No Recurring Order Automation

Your website has no subscription engine and no reminders triggered by order history, so every refill depends on the customer coming back on their own. Repeat revenue then follows their memory, which makes it hard to forecast.

Stock Not Synced Across Channels

Your shop’s POS system and your website keep separate stock counts. So when the shop sells the last bag, the website still shows it as available. If a customer places an order, your team has to cancel or delay the delivery.

A Single-Language Storefront

According to CSA Research’s 2020 survey of 8,709 consumers in 29 countries, 76% prefer to buy products with information in their own language, and 40% will never buy from websites in another language. UAE customers shop in both English and Arabic, so a site in only one language can lose customers. The same goes for a site whose Arabic pages fall back to English at checkout or lack a proper right-to-left layout.

UAE Pet Owners Are Already Online

Pet owners in the UAE order food and pet-related products from their phones and computers.

According to TGM Research’s 2023 survey, close to one in three UAE pet owners (30.7%) buy pet food from online stores. That is only a few points behind independent pet stores and small chains at 36.4%. Grooming is the other half of the routine, and the same survey found that 40.3% of owners use a groomer.

Both habits tend to repeat. Food runs out every few weeks, and most pets need grooming on a regular cycle. An owner who already orders food from a phone will expect to book the groomer the same way, with no calls.

The UAE market is moving in the same direction. Grand View Research puts UAE pet care eCommerce revenue at USD 171.6 million in 2023 and projects USD 308.7 million by 2030.

A market growing like that invites new competitors, and the brands that give owners a better online experience will keep the repeat customers.

Pet Care Website Features to Offer UAE Customers

Live stock and delivery dates. You can connect the product page to your ERP or inventory system through an API or webhooks, so the stock figure updates when a unit sells in a shop or leaves a warehouse. An omnichannel commerce setup can keep that figure the same across your physical locations and your website. The delivery date can be calculated from your order cut-off time and your courier’s schedule for the customer’s location.

Repeat delivery for products. Add a subscription engine that stores each customer’s delivery schedule and a tokenized payment method, then creates the order automatically on the next ship date. Include a self-service account page that allows customers to pause a plan or change the interval at any time.

One profile for each pet. Create a profile for every pet with fields for species, breed, birth date, weight and health notes, and store it in custom customer attributes. Sync these records with your CRM and customer data platform, so orders and reminders read from the same record.

A product finder quiz. Add a short quiz that maps each answer to product attributes in your catalog, such as life stage and dietary need, and returns a filtered list. Keep those attributes in clean, structured form in your product information management (PIM) system so the quiz can match them.

Product details and filtered reviews. You can store ingredients and feeding tables as structured product data, as metafields on Shopify or product attributes on Adobe Commerce. Your PIM can manage them and publish a vet-checked version to each product page. The review form can collect breed and age as separate fields, so owners filter reviews for a pet like theirs.

Loyalty points and referrals. You can add a rewards service that records points for every order and every referral, and let the checkout apply them as a discount. It can share customer IDs with your CRM and marketing automation, so reminders and offers match each customer’s history.

Arabic and English pages. You can give each language its own URL with hreflang tags, so search engines show the right version to each shopper. The Arabic version can use a right-to-left layout built with CSS logical properties. Product data and order emails can be stored in both languages in the catalog. Codilar’s experience design process can keep the two versions consistent.

Checkout for UAE payment habits. You can set up your payment gateway to accept cards and buy now pay later (BNPL) options through providers such as Tabby and Tamara. Cash on delivery can stay available, with an OTP or WhatsApp check before dispatch. Prices can display in AED with 5% VAT included, and order confirmations can carry the tax details.

Picking the Right Platform for Your Pet Care Brand

The right platform is the one that fits what your company needs today and where it is headed. Shopify, Shopify Plus and Adobe Commerce can all support a strong pet care brand. Each fits a different set of needs.

Shopify and Shopify Plus

Shopify suits a pet care brand that is starting to sell online or growing from a single storefront. Shopify Plus is its enterprise tier, with higher API limits and checkout customization.

Shopify Plus runs as a hosted service. Shopify manages hosting and platform updates, so your team works on the catalog and customers. You extend it through apps and the Admin API. A subscription app handles repeat food orders, and a booking app handles grooming slots. When an app falls short, developers can build a custom app on the Admin API or add checkout logic with Shopify Functions. For a faster front end, Shopify’s Hydrogen framework supports a headless storefront.

Codilar is an official Shopify Plus Partner. We connect Shopify Plus to your ERP and PIM systems, and we set up local payment gateways and courier integrations.

Adobe Commerce

A large catalog of regulated products or wholesale dealers with their own pricing are the usual signs to select Adobe Commerce. Its open architecture supports custom development, and the site can be built exactly as your business runs.

By using custom modules and APIs, developers can customize price rules, approval workflows, and other operations. Within Adobe Commerce, you can find all B2B-specific functionalities like company accounts, shared catalogs, and custom price lists for each dealer. It also enables the use of multi-source inventory management, which allows storing products in several warehouses and retrieving the most relevant data for a particular client.

You can host it on Adobe’s managed cloud or on infrastructure you choose, with a development partner like Codilar (an Adobe Solution Partner at the Gold tier) handling upgrades and maintenance.

If you sell products directly to customers online and supply pet shops at wholesale prices, both can run from one catalog, and each dealer sees their own prices.

Compliance on Either Platform

Pet food and pet health products carry specific UAE requirements, and your website should be set up to support them.

• Accurate product information. Product pages should show ingredients and the production and expiry dates, along with a photo of the Arabic label. Store each as a structured field so it stays consistent in search results, listing pages and the cart.
• Prescription step for veterinary products. Retail sale of veterinary products requires a prescription from a licensed vet under MOCCAE’s 2026 resolution. The checkout should hold these items behind a prescription upload or verification step.

Both platforms can hold these details. Shopify Plus keeps them in custom product fields called metafields, and Adobe Commerce keeps them as product attributes.

Pet Care eCommerce Cost and Timeline in the UAE

Cost and timeline depend on how much you build in the first release and how many systems it connects to.

Five factors move the numbers most:

• Catalog structure. The number of products and variants, and the attributes each one carries, such as ingredients and life stage.
• Integrations. Two-way sync with your ERP or inventory system, plus your order management system and delivery partner APIs.
• Custom logic. Subscription billing and dealer pricing rules.
• Localization. Arabic and English content with a right-to-left layout and bilingual emails.
• Data migration. Moving your catalog and customer data from an existing platform.

A phased release plan limits risk, because each phase goes live and is tested with real orders.