Dog Hop

An Intuitive User Experience

Dog Hop is service-based company offering long-distance pet transportation throughout the United States and Canada. They needed a way to collect basic trip information (pickup/destination address, number of pets and pickup date) from a customer and provide them with a detailed quote, trip itinerary and the option to book the trip immediately using the eCommerce checkout.

Trip Quote Calculator

The custom booking experience centers around the trip quote calculator. This feature was designed to imitate forms found on popular booking services. Prospective customers can use the calculator to get a price quote and book the trip, all without picking up the phone. This automated approach was important to DogHop, as it’s a big part of what sets them apart from competitors.

Behind the scenes, the trip quote calculator is doing some clever things to enhance usability.

• Predictive text is used to reduce errors with address validation.
• The Pickup Date field is using block-out dates for existing trips or dates when a driver is unavailable. This helps to eliminate any frustration in finding out that the selected pickup date is unavailable later in the booking process.
• The trip cost is calculated using the distance between the pickup/destination addresses and some fancy business logic that decides the per mile rate for the trip.

Trip Itinerary

After submitting the trip quote form, the customer is provided an instant quote and a summary of the trip itinerary. This summary includes general trip information, details about departure/arrival, and any additional taxes or fees. All of this works together to give an accurate quote that the customer can act on immediately by booking the trip.

Multi-Step Checkout

The checkout experience is organized into multiple steps separated by category. Dog Hop needs to gather a lot of information from the customer in order to book a trip and separating that process into multiple steps makes it more manageable for the customer. Each step uses conditional logic to show/hide feels that are relevant to the customer based on the trip quote or information they have already entered. The last step includes a review section to ensure that everything has been captured accurately before booking the trip.

Custom Integrations

There are a few integrations that make this eCommerce workflow really shine.

• Dog Hop partners with One Tree Planted to donate trees for each trip. In addition to Dog Hop’s donation, the customer is given the option to donate additional trees at checkout. The total tree count for each order is then passed along to One Tree Planted using the Digital Humani API.
• The checkout integrates with Dog Hop’s booking platform. On order confirmation, the new trip is programmatically booked and the travel dates are automatically blocked off to avoid potential conflicts with future bookings.
• Everything about the customer, pet(s), and trip is passed along to HubSpot CRM. Dog Hop uses Hubspot as their control center for everything related to customer engagement, so it’s important to have all that data available in the CRM for excellent customer service and future communication.

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