Wedgewood Manages Complexity and Maintains Trust with Commerce Cloud

Some business models are truly complex, requiring nuance, customization, and ultimate visibility across each operating unit. Case in point: Consider the myriad of needs and capabilities required for a highly regulated pharmaceutical company that both manufactures and sells pet medications to vets, partners, and pet owners alike. That’s… a lot.  And that’s exactly what Wedgewood does — with phenomenal success. Wedgewood works hand-in-paw with veterinarians to provide a broad range of compounded medications, top-notch service, and digital pharmacy storefronts.

We caught up with Jennifer MacDonald, Director of Ecommerce at Wedgewood, to learn how the business manages all the complexity and thrives in a highly regulated, highly competitive market. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.

Q: First, can you tell us about Wedgewood and its unique approach to the veterinary industry?

Veterinarians are busy providing a lot of support — whether it’s to animals, pet owners, or their business partners. Every day involves servicing pet owners as well as performing physical exams (sometimes even emergency operations), administering medication in the clinic, and more. We shouldn’t also expect them to be tech experts.

That’s where we come in. We try to give them a little bit of time back, and hopefully ease the burden on their staff by white-labeling ecommerce storefronts for veterinarians so they can sell pharmaceutical products to their clients. Wedgewood also manages the inventory fulfillment side of animal pharmaceuticals through our pharmacies all across the country. We fulfill and ship medications right to the door of the pet owners, helping vets maintain loyalty and satisfaction with their clients.

Ultimately, Wedgewood helps create better connectivity between vets and pet owners, and removes the burden on vet offices to offer digital storefronts and advanced ecommerce capabilities. We facilitate that for them — through our partnership with Commerce Cloud — so they can focus on what they do best: take care of pets and keep them healthy. 

Q: Wedgewood has had phenomenal success combining B2B and B2B2C models. Can you tell us how you did it?

When it comes to B2B and B2B2C, people tend to think of a business model as either “sell with” or “sell through”. But for Wedgewood, it’s a combination of those two things. We don’t want to interrupt the relationship built between the vet and the pet owner, but we also want to augment both from a product availability and delivery standpoint, as well as from a knowledge and service perspective. It’s sell through and sell with. 

We are able to augment the veterinarian’s relationship with pet owners and provide meaningful services that are crucial to both parties. For example, when the vet isn’t available because they’re closed for the day, or if a pet owner wants to bring the digital storefront up and browse medications during their vet visit, they can do that. We also facilitate customer service, so the pet owner can call in if they have a question about a specific product or pet health issue.

We empower customer service agents with the tools they need to extend a veterinarian’s support. The Salesforce platform gives agents access to the data and background they need to help clients, whether it’s coming from our prescribing platform, order management system, or elsewhere from the storefront. When a customer calls in, the agent can do everything they need right there in one screen, without having to call out, check on information with the pharmacy, or connect the client to a different department.  

Our goal is to continue to empower vets with the right technical capabilities and enhancements  based on feedback and the real-world problems they experience every day. Our success comes from our ability to act as an extension and provide support for our veterinarians, their clinics, and their clients.

Q: Wedgewood is a manufacturer, pharmacy, and fulfillment center all in one — in a highly regulated industry, no less. Can you tell us how you manage all the complexity?

Our business is definitely nuanced and complex. At any given moment, we have orders coming in from many different channels: from our vets, from end consumers, and from other partners that sell medications through their own sites. 

Order management is a crucial part of our success. It keeps us organized and on track, and helps us determine what fulfillment location or what kind of special handling the product needs. For example, some compound medications are temperature sensitive and they need to be expedited when shipped. Controlled substances have different regulations depending on the state they’re shipping to. We have a lot of complex navigation and workflows to work though. Order management helps us do that through product attributes, custom objects, and more.  

Q: As you built out your ecommerce tech stack, what were your main considerations? What were some of the overall objectives you wanted to make sure you had, and what major constraints did you have to think about?

One of the biggest challenges when launching the commercial line of Wedgewood was that it created two totally different audiences with two totally different goals. On one hand, we have our partner veterinarians: The goal of our pharmacy business is to make vets’ lives easier by facilitating online ordering of pet prescriptions and managing the fulfillment. On the other hand, the goal of the commercial side of our business is to make it as easy as possible for pet owners to buy affordable meds for their pets, from the vets they trust. Those are two very different audiences, which meant we had to be very thoughtful and tailor the unique experiences of each audience very differently, even though we’re one business. We needed an ecommerce partner that would make this very easy and streamlined. 

Salesforce allows us to tailor our different platforms to meet the needs of our two unique audiences, while also integrating and supporting the same product attributes, the same data fields, and the same information that we need to sync between our systems.

Q: What are some of the common ways you leverage behavioral, transactional, and customer data to make the experience more personalized and drive loyalty with both vets and pet owners?

We live and breathe data, dashboards, and reports. Our goal is to optimize the experience in impactful ways and remove as much friction as possible. Based on data, we know that 80% of the time, pet owners are simply reordering the same medications. So we put those front and center for pet owners to find easily. They don’t even have to look. 

We leverage platform data as well as data from Salesforce Order Management. This helps us catch issues early and know which products might be causing fulfillment delays or getting caught in different product statuses. 

However, one of the most valuable data sets is what we hear firsthand, directly from our customer service and sales teams. We pay particularly close attention to that feedback loop, then prioritize making quick enhancements for our users. 

One of the biggest factors driving personalization and loyalty is customer service — and this is one of the ways Wedgewood differentiates itself. We have a very skilled customer service team, and part of that is ensuring they have the right data and tools to deliver exceptional, personalized experiences.

They have all the data within their consoles, connected to ecommerce, order management, and other systems, to check on order statuses and deeply understand our products. If they’re on a call and they have a question about why a vet recommended a specific medication, they can access the vet’s notes and fill in any blanks for the client. These tools and their interoperability ensure that our service team can solve even the most complex client problems.
At Wedgewood, we have the holy grail of great service agents and great tools. You can have the best technology in the world, but if your business users don’t like it and don’t want to use it, it isn’t going to be successful.

Q: As an innovator, what are you most excited about when it comes to the future of commerce?

I’m so excited to see technology advancing and empowering veterinarians through Wedgewood and others. Providing quality, real-time support for pet owners is getting easier and more convenient through AI like Agentforce. 

I’m excited to continue to lean into data and technology, and break down barriers to make it easier for pet owners to support their animals and keep them healthy. My goal is to make it as easy to purchase a prescription for your pets online as it is to buy a t-shirt.