Amazon rules the online jungle of pet product retailing, while Chewy.com takes a sizable bite of sales too. Brick-and-mortar retailers’ online incarnations rounded out the top five in Packaged Facts’ report “U.S. Pet Market Focus: Walmart as Competitor.”
Packaged facts used survey data that included 1,191 people in the United States of age 18 and older who had purchased pet products in the past 12 months either in-store or online. OF these, 531 purchased pet products online.
Top online pet product retailers
- Amazon - 20 percent
- Chewy.com* - 13 percent
- Walmart - 7 percent
- PetSmart – 6 percent
- Petco – 6 percent
*Chewy.com sales include Pet360.com and PetFoodDirect.com sales
Pet product online sales analysis
Packaged Facts analysts evaluated online pet food and product sales by usage and frequency of purchase. The same top five also appeared in this analysis.
Online pet product buyers purchased from Amazon the most, with 35 percent. Another 26 percent of survey respondents reported buying from Chewy.com, including Pet360.com and PetFoodDirect.com.
Among the brick-and-mortar retailers’ online presences, Walmart.com and PetSmart.com both had eight percent of pet product shoppers buying from them. Seven percent of survey respondents bought from Petco.com.
Pet food sales on Amazon up 34 percent by July 2018
Sales of pet products on Amazon grew by 31 percent in the first half of 2018, compared to the first half of 2017, according to data from One Click Retail in the report “Amazon Q2 Update: Pet Products.” Online pet food and feeding supplies sales reached more than US$360 million in the first two quarters of 2018 on Amazon. That represents an increase of 34 percent year over year. Overall pet products sales hit US$780 million on Amazon in that time period.
“On Amazon, the pet food category makes up nearly half of total pet product sales – in the total domestic market, food makes up approximately two-thirds of the sector,” wrote One Click Retail’s analysts. “As an aside, it's worth noting that the discrepancy between these shares might suggest that Amazon's Pet Food sales are likely to experience a lot more growth before leveling off.”
