It’s a well-known narrative: Online pet food and pet care spending took off during the pandemic and has never looked back. And that’s a global phenomenon: Online retailers now command a 50.6% share of the global pet food market, “driven by auto-replenishment behavior, deeper assortment visibility and easier access to premium and specialist formulations,” says Future Market Insights (FMI).
In the U.S., 39% of pet food sales occur online, according to Packaged Facts in late 2025. Yet if you expand to tracking the behavior of “omnichannel” shoppers — a steadily growing faction — who shop both in brick-and-mortar stores and online, the share jumps to 44.8% of purchasers and a 64.2% of pet food dollars, according to NielsenIQ (NIQ) from March 2025. I imagine those percentages have increased, at least, just a little, in the year since.
Where things get really interesting is when you look at online pet food/pet care shopping behavior broken down by age and income groups, especially compared to e-commerce for all product categories.
How online shopping varies by geography and generation
“The U.S. has one of the oldest spending profiles in digital commerce in the world,” reads a press release from EBANX and World Data Lab, announcing a new report, “Beyond Borders 2026.”
“American consumers over 45 years old account for 50% of the total value of all online purchases in the country,” it continues. “And that proportion is only going to increase, since the only age group projected to grow its share over the next decade is the 65+ segment, rising from 19% to 23%. By 2035, the over-45 cohort will represent 54% of all digital transactions.”
While other developed economies like Japan, Italy, South Korea, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Canada and the U.K. have similar profiles, the situation is completely different in developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, EBANX says.
However, when it comes to online pet care spending in the U.S. — or, more specifically, features like direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales and subscriptions/autoshipping that can help create and maintain customer loyalty — the opposite is true. Only 18% of U.S. boomer pet owners buy DTC pet products, and gen X, just 34%, per Packaged Facts in a March 2026 webinar. In contrast, 69% of gen Z and 58% of millennial owners buy DTC. (Overall, 41% of U.S. pet owners do, and pet food is the product category most likely to be purchased DTC, at 15%.)
The share of boomer pet owners signing up for a pet product autoship or subscription service is higher, at 29%, and the same is true for gen X owners, at 46% (just below the overall U.S. pet owner share of 48%). But gen Z and millennial owners still surpass those levels at 67% and 61%, respectively.
The 2025 NIQ data shows the impact of subscriptions in a different way: Online pet food subscription sales outpaced those of non-subscription online sales by about US$160 million in early 2025, as those subscription sales passed US$800 million.
U.S. pet food shoppers, digital consumers overall have higher incomes
The EBANX data on overall e-commerce spending does more closely resemble online pet care spending in the U.S. when it comes to income level. According to EBANX: “84% of American online spending is driven by rich and upper middle class consumers, those spending more than US$90 a day. That’s the highest level of concentration among the 184 countries analyzed, and is expected to reach 88% by 2035.”
It also contrasts with, again, emerging markets, where “an average of 53 cents of every dollar spent in e-commerce comes from core middle and lower middle buyers.” (The press release does not give income levels or definitions for “rich” or any of the middle class labels.)
U.S. pet food e-commerce spending skews toward pet owners with household incomes of more than US$150,000, at 47%, Packaged Facts says. “Within the e-commerce channel, households with incomes of US$150,000+ are similarly over-represented among pet food shoppers at Chewy (at an index of 120, with 100 as the base index), though fall exactly at the norm (index of 100) as pet food shoppers at Amazon,” wrote David Sprinkle, director of pet market research.
