Petstar: Making 30,000 Pet Products Navigable in One Screen

Hangzhou Tianyuan Pet Products — Petstar on its export site — has 30,000 product items, eight factory sites and buyers in more than 500 brands. A catalogue that size is an asset for the sales team and a maze for anyone visiting the website for the first time. That was the problem we set out to fix, and the result is best described from the buyer's side of the screen.

Before: a buyer landed on a homepage that listed categories, clicked into "Pet Beds", and arrived at a grid of forty products with no way to narrow by material, size or market. After: the same buyer lands on a category page that asks three questions — what species, what material, what market — and returns a shortlist in one screen.

What we changed first

The company was founded in 1998 and describes itself as China's first listed pet products company. It operates 300,000 square metres of factory space across China, the US, the UK, Germany, Japan, Cambodia and Vietnam, employs over 1,700 people, and runs a 90-person design team that puts out more than 200 new items a month. None of that was the issue. The issue was that all of it was told in prose on an About page, and none of it helped a buyer choose a product.

So we cut the homepage down to two jobs: state what the factory can do, and route the visitor into the catalogue by the decision they are actually making. Category entry points became product families rather than internal department names — "cat trees and furniture" instead of "wood products".

Making 30,000 SKUs navigable

No buyer browses 30,000 items, and no website should ask them to. We built the catalogue around three filters that match how private-label buyers actually brief a supplier: species (cat, dog, small animal, bird), material and construction (felt, plush, wood, metal frame), and market (US, EU, Japan). Each combination returns a curated selection rather than an endless scroll.

Product pages follow one template: lifestyle image, dimension drawing, material and certification statement, packing data, MOQ band, and sampling lead time. The last two matter more than the photography — a brand manager deciding whether to test a new cat tree needs to know it can be sampled in seven to fifteen days and produced in twenty-five to forty-five, and those numbers were previously only available by email.

Turning certifications into a filter

Pet products sell into markets where compliance is the first gate: GRS, OEKO-TEX, ISO 9001, FSC, BSCI, SEDEX. On most supplier sites these appear as a row of logos at the bottom. Here each certificate is attached to the material or process it applies to, so a buyer sourcing recycled PET fabric for the German market can see, on the fabric page, which certification covers it and which factory holds it.

The same logic applies to the eight production sites. Instead of one "global presence" map, each product family names the site that makes it — the Cambodia factory for volume bedding, the Vietnam site for a specific range, the US facility for short-run North American orders. Buyers who have been burned by undisclosed subcontracting read this as evidence rather than decoration.

The quote path

The old site ended every page with a generic contact form. The new one carries a "Get a Quote" action that persists in the header and pre-fills the product family and market selected by the buyer, so the enquiry that arrives in the sales inbox already contains the two facts that used to take three emails to establish: what category, and which market.

For a company whose sales cycle starts with a specification conversation, that single change shortened the distance between a first visit and a usable brief. The rest of the site — showroom photography, the sampling timeline, the OEM/ODM process diagram from enquiry to delivery — supports that one path instead of competing with it.

The takeaway is not complicated. When a manufacturer has 30,000 SKUs, the website's job is not to display them. It is to help a buyer eliminate 29,950 of them in under a minute, and then make the remaining fifty look like something worth requesting a sample of.