When you run a store in the retail industry like a clothing store or a jewelry shop, there are likely a lot of things going through your mind. Meeting the bills, keeping employees happy, and managing your time properly are just a few of the things that business owners have to consider each day.

The same is true when running a pet shop. Animals can get sick or cause an accident. Also , there’s rules and regulations that you might unintentionally violate too. This is where pet shop insurance comes into play, protecting your business and the animals under your care.

This guide will cover everything that business owners should know about pet store insurance. We’re going to start off with the most common types of insurance that you can get your hands on for pet shops. When that’s done, we’ll discuss the cost of pet shop insurance before diving into three of the best pet shop insurance companies.

Pet Shop Liability Insurance

When shopping around for pet store insurance, it’s likely that the first kind of coverage you’ll want to look into is liability insurance. This is the kind of insurance that protects you from lawsuits caused by unfavorable and uncontrollable situations

For example, if someone is walking by outside of your business and they take a sudden tumble and they manage to injure themselves while they’re on your property, you may be held liable for it. Liability insurance exists to pay out in these cases, but not only in the event of bodily injury.

Another scenario is when someone asthmatic visits your pet shop and suffers an onset of their illness. Sure, you’re not at fault as the person should know better that a pet store isn’t a place for people suffering from lung-related illness. Still, through a lawsuit, there are numerous ways that a lawyer can make you liable. 

Liability insurance can also protect you from people who are claiming that you’re responsible for property damage while they were at your workplace. This can range from someone slipping and dropping their phone to someone who had their car vandalized while parked in your parking lot.

However, there’s more than just one form of liability coverage, and there are even a few kinds of insurance that have the word “liability” in their name but aren’t exactly similar to what we just described. The two most common forms of liability insurance are public liability and general liability.

General liability insurance is the more expensive option of the two because it will apply to more situations in which you may end up on the hook for someone’s expenses. This is because this kind of insurance will apply to anyone who is within your business’s property since it’s not limited like public liability coverage.

Public liability insurance for pet stores tends to be more affordable because it is only limited to members of the general public. This includes people who are walking by on the street, customers who come into your store, and people working with other companies who happen to be on the premises.

Pet Shop Business Insurance 

Along with liability insurance, yet another common form of insurance for pet shops is business insurance, sometimes referred to as a BOP or Business Owner Policy. This kind of policy isn’t just a single form of coverage like a general or public liability policy. Rather, it’s a combination of different types of coverage.

If you know a thing or two about the insurance industry then you know that carriers like to bundle their services and offer them for a discount. This ensures that they get more of your business and that you can get better prices for what would have cost you more had you purchased it separately.

A BOP tends to combine a few different types of insurance depending on who you purchase it from, but the vast majority of them have two components. The first of these is a liability policy. This can be either public liability or general liability depending on the cost of the business owner policy.

This is coupled with a commercial property insurance policy which exists to cover any damage to the building or some of the items within it. 

Pet Store Insurance  Cost

Determining how much pet store insurance is going to cost you tends to be a lot harder than figuring that out for any number of other businesses. Don’t get us wrong, it’s hard to have an idea of how much your insurance will cost without a quote as pet stores are unique.

This is due to the wide range of animals that you could be selling within your pet store. If you’re selling expensive cats, then you can expect to pay quite a bit for your insurance. This is also the case if you’re selling exotic animals that may end up injuring one of your customers.

However, the animals themselves aren’t the only factor that goes into determining the cost of your pet shop insurance. Another factor that you’ll have to consider is the size of your pet shop, which will have just as large (if not more) of an impact on your eventual insurance premiums.

When you think about it, it makes sense that larger stores have higher premiums because they have more stock and they see more customers throughout a year, making them more likely to need to make a claim at some point or another.

To ensure that the following numbers are good reference values, we’ve gone ahead and used a medium-sized pet store with a good claims history to gather them.

The average cost of pet shop insurance based on the numbers we’ve gathered from these three carriers is about $33.81 per month or $513.58 per year.