Every pet business that starts selling online faces the same question: should it focus on marketplaces like Mercado Livre, Shopee, and Amazon, or invest in building its own website? At first glance, the answer seems obvious—”both”. In reality, however, every dollar invested and every hour of the team’s attention must be allocated strategically, and that decision changes significantly depending on the stage of the business.
Entrepreneur Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and director of Enjoy Pets and a marketplace specialist, works closely with this decision because his expertise lies at the intersection of these two models within the pet industry. Read on to learn more.
Visibility: The Marketplace’s Early Advantage
Marketplaces already have traffic, consumer trust, and payment infrastructure in place. This allows a pet store to start selling quickly without relying on expensive marketing campaigns to attract visitors to a brand-new website. For businesses launching their digital operations, this convenience is often a major advantage.
The downside is that growth takes place within an environment owned by the marketplace—not by the pet store itself. Hugo Galvao points out that product visibility, commission structures, and payout timelines are all subject to the platform’s policies, leaving sellers with limited control over these critical factors.
Profit Margins and Costs: Where the Numbers Get Tight
Marketplaces charge a commission on every sale, reducing profit margins—especially in lower-margin categories such as pet food and cat litter, where margins are already relatively slim. A standalone website eliminates those per-sale commissions but requires ongoing investment in driving traffic, whether through paid advertising or content marketing.
Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho notes that many businesses in the pet industry underestimate this second expense—the cost of attracting visitors to their own website. As a result, they often conclude that marketplaces are more expensive, when in reality those costs are simply more visible.
Customer Data: The Difference That Becomes Clear Over Time
On a marketplace, each sale tends to stand alone. The customer belongs to the marketplace, not the pet store. On a proprietary website, however, every purchase can become the beginning of a long-term relationship, providing access to purchase history, recurring buying patterns, and direct communication for future marketing initiatives.
This distinction is particularly important for businesses that depend on repeat purchases, such as those selling pet food and pet care products. A system like the one developed by Enjoy Pets is designed to balance both approaches, leveraging marketplace sales volume while also building valuable first-party customer data and insights into pet owners’ purchasing behavior.
Brand Building: Where Your Own Website Has the Edge
Within a marketplace, pet stores compete side by side with dozens of other sellers on the same search results page, often competing primarily on price. According to Hugo Galvao, building a distinctive brand identity in that environment is challenging because the shopping experience belongs to the platform rather than the seller.
A dedicated website allows a business to tell its story, design a unique shopping experience, and create an environment that customers recognize as belonging to that specific pet store—not just another retailer within a large online marketplace. Developing that identity takes time, but it fosters customer loyalty that is much more difficult for competitors to replicate.
The Decision Is Rarely About Choosing One Over the Other
Pet businesses that achieve sustainable growth typically view marketplaces and their own website as serving different roles within the same overall strategy rather than as competing channels. Marketplaces provide immediate visibility and sales volume, while a proprietary website offers stronger margins, valuable customer data, and direct relationships with buyers.
Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho summarizes this approach by suggesting that the more useful question is not which channel is better, but rather what role each channel should play at the business’s current stage of growth. As a pet store expands, improves its cash flow, and gains the ability to invest more in its own digital presence, that balance naturally evolves alongside its marketplace operations.
