Every pet e-commerce playbook seems to agree on the same idea: a ten percent discount is what brings a customer back for the next bag of food. Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and director of Enjoy Pets, indicated that coupons pile up in every seller’s marketing calendar as if repeat purchases were mainly a pricing problem to solve.
One can observe, then, that the actual pattern behind repeat pet purchases looks nothing like that. A dog does not eat less because its owner missed a promotion, and the moment food runs low tends to matter far more than the price tag attached to the last order.
The myth: discounts as the loyalty lever
The belief makes intuitive sense at first glance. Discount codes are cheap to create, easy to measure and simple to plug into any email campaign, so it is tempting to treat every drop in repeat orders as a pricing gap waiting for a coupon. Retail habits built in categories with genuine price competition, like electronics or fashion, get copied into pet e-commerce without much adjustment, even though the two situations reward very different behavior.
However, Hugo Galvao states that the problem relies on the fact that pet food, litter and medication are not discretionary purchases a customer weighs against alternatives each time. They are consumed on a fixed rhythm set by the animal, not by the market, which changes what actually drives the decision to buy again from the same store rather than search for a better price elsewhere.
What actually happens after the first purchase
A bag of dog food lasts a predictable number of weeks depending on the animal’s size and appetite, and the household usually knows, roughly, when it is going to run out. What determines whether they return to the same seller is less the price of that first order and more whether reordering feels effortless when the moment arrives. A ten percent discount offered at the wrong moment, weeks before the bag is empty, does little to change that calculation.
Running out unexpectedly creates a small but real anxiety for pet owners, since it means an emergency trip to a physical store or a rushed order with unpredictable delivery. Hugo Galvao mentions that a seller that consistently arrives before that moment, without the buyer having to think about timing, earns a kind of trust that a one-time discount cannot replicate on its own. That trust is what shows up later as a repeat order placed without comparing prices elsewhere first.
What a predictability-first approach looks like
At Enjoy Pets, Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho applies this by treating reorder timing as part of the product itself, not as an afterthought handled by marketing. Purchase history for consumables is used to anticipate when a household is likely to need a refill, rather than waiting for the customer to remember on their own.
That shift changes what a loyalty program is actually for. Instead of competing on who offers the deepest discount this month, the store competes on who removes friction from an errand nobody enjoys doing under pressure, which tends to matter more to a tired pet owner than a few reais saved.
What this means for how pet brands compete for repeat buyers
Price still plays a role, particularly for the first purchase, when a new customer is comparing options with no history to guide the decision. Once that relationship exists, the competition shifts to something a coupon cannot fix on its own.
To Hugo Galvao, the businesses winning repeat purchases in the pet category are not necessarily the ones with the deepest promotions. They are the ones a tired pet owner does not have to think about when the food bowl starts looking emptier than it should.
