Pet Store Employee Training: 6 Critical Topics

How confident are you in your employees’ abilities?

Great employees understand the business, complete their tasks accurately and efficiently, and genuinely care about helping customers. While these qualities take time to develop, employees are far more likely to succeed when given proper training.

In a pet store, staff guide customers in caring for their animals, like recommending the right food or grooming products. With the right training, employees can provide shoppers with appropriate recommendations that keep pets healthy and happy.

When staff lack confidence in their duties, missed tasks, errors, and lost sales often follow. While some mistakes stem from negligence, many issues can be avoided with thorough training and clear guidance on where to find answers.

In this blog, we’ll explore six essential topics to cover during pet store employee training, so you can equip your team with the skills they need to succeed.

Let’s jump in.

6 Critical Pet Store Employee Training Topics

Some skills are learned on the job, while others should be taught before an employee works with customers. As you onboard new team members, start with these areas.

1. Customer Service Fundamentals

Train your employees on core customer service skills. This includes greeting shoppers when they enter the store, answering questions about products and services, and actively listening to understand customer needs. Encourage team members to be courteous, respectful, and attentive at all times.

An important part of customer service is handling frustrated or upset customers. For example, a customer may struggle to find a certain dog food they saw online, or they might call because their order of cat toys still hasn’t arrived.

In these situations, employees should acknowledge the customer’s frustration, apologize, and resolve the issue if possible. If they can’t, explain when to involve a supervisor and the proper procedure for doing so.

Remember: Great customer service at a pet store comes from a real desire to help customers and their animal companions. Encourage this mindset and recognize team members when they deliver top-notch service.

Related Read: Customer Experience in Retail: 6 Pet Store Best Practices

2. Pet Product Knowledge

Your employees need a solid understanding of pets and pet products to make informed recommendations. While staff aren’t expected to replace a veterinarian, a general knowledge of foods, supplements, and grooming helps build trust with shoppers and sell more products.

Train your team to answer questions effectively yet concisely. Show them how to fit collars, harnesses, and other apparel on specific animals, and help them identify which toys and other accessories are appropriate for each pet type and life stage.

Building expertise takes time. Provide a thorough overview when employees start, but don’t expect them to remember everything at once. Offer periodic product training to help your staff become more confident and proficient over time.

3. POS System Training and Use

Ringing up sales is a key part of any retail job. Many businesses rely on modern point of sale (POS) systems to process transactions. While these platforms are designed to be intuitive, guided training helps employees become comfortable with them more quickly.

When a new team member joins, walk them through the checkout process and allow them to observe it several times. Be sure to cover less common scenarios, like applying discounts, accepting returns, or processing exchanges.

After demonstrating a variety of situations, give employees time to practice and become familiar with how the system works. As their confidence grows, introduce additional tasks, like enrolling customers in your loyalty program, redeeming rewards, or booking grooming appointments.

Related Read: 5 Best Pet Store POS Systems To Build Your Pet Business

4. Inventory Management Best Practices

You likely already have an organized approach to managing your pet store’s inventory. To keep it consistent, your employees need to be trained on each step of the process.

Make sure every team member is familiar with:

• Receiving
• Barcoding
• Shelf placement
• Inventory counts and audits

Show staff where each product belongs and how shelves should be stocked. For perishable items, teach the first in, first out (FIFO) method. This approach ensures older units are sold first, reducing waste.

A digital POS system tracks inventory counts so you always know how much product you have on hand. These totals update automatically with each sale, but occasional audits help ensure your numbers are correct. Demonstrate how to count inventory and update totals in the system.

When employees understand your inventory practices and follow your procedures closely, you can avoid errors and oversights that lead to overstocking or stockouts.

Related Read: How To Manage Pet Store Inventory: Top Tips and Tools

5. Workplace and Pet Safety

Don’t forget to go over safety regulations with new team members. In a pet store, this may include proper techniques for lifting boxes, using ladders, and cleaning the floors to prevent spills or slips. Prepare employees for these potential hazards and explain how to handle them safely.

Because customers may bring their pets into the store, it’s important to maintain a safe environment for animals as well. This means keeping perishable items off the floor so pets can’t get into them and creating aisles wide enough for both people and pets to move comfortably.

6. Merchandising Skills

You may choose to train more experienced employees to help you make decisions about merchandising. This concept focuses on how products are organized and presented throughout your pet store. With tried-and-true product presentation techniques, you can significantly increase sales.

Common merchandising strategies include creating product displays, setting up endcaps to highlight specific items, and placing impulse buys near the register. Another useful approach is cross-selling — placing frequently purchased items next to one another to encourage customers to buy both.

Effective merchandising requires ongoing attention, with items moved regularly to keep the store feeling fresh. Delegating these tasks to trusted employees helps keep products selling, even when you’re not in the store.

Because staff spend so much time on the sales floor, they may also offer helpful ideas about which items should be placed on clearance, which top sellers deserve a display, or how best to showcase a new product.

Offer Excellent Pet Store Employee Training With eTailPet

A well-trained team of employees is an essential part of an effective pet store. When staff have the knowledge they need, they create a better experience for customers and keep the store running smoothly.

A POS system with simple navigation makes the training process easier. eTailPet is a cloud-based POS solution built specifically for pet stores. Its intuitive interface is designed for quick learning, helping you bring new team members up to speed.

eTailPet’s industry-specific features make it an ideal fit for pet retailers. You can book training and grooming appointments, access pet supply catalogs to find the right products, and handle daily operations from one platform. Our software also includes payment processing, inventory management, e-commerce, and marketing tools.

At eTailPet, we want to help you get the features you need at a price you can afford. Check out our Build and Price tool to see which plan is right for your pet store!