Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho compares building your own pet store website against selling only on marketplaces
The founder and CEO of Enjoy Pets, Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, gets asked a version of the same question by nearly every pet entrepreneur weighing where to put their next investment: build a proper website, or keep growing inside marketplaces where the traffic already exists? This doubt stays in a lot of businessmen’s minds.
The big problem is that these options end up being treated as a single either-or decision, with one excluding the other. However, the question misses how differently the two models actually perform and on what.
What marketplace-only selling gets right
Selling exclusively through marketplaces is, for most new pet businesses, the fastest way to get in front of buyers who are already searching and already comfortable paying. There is no need to build traffic from nothing, and the platform absorbs much of the trust and logistics work that would otherwise take years to establish independently.
That convenience comes at a real cost to margin. After accounting for referral fees, fulfillment charges, advertising and storage, marketplace sellers typically keep somewhere between ten and twenty percent of revenue as profit. Those fees have also been climbing steadily for years, which means a seller who built an entire business on a single marketplace is exposed to cost increases they have no control over.
What an owned website gets right
An independent online store flips that equation. Once the upfront cost of building and maintaining it is covered, stores selling directly to customers commonly see profit margins between thirty and fifty percent, since there is no marketplace commission eating into every sale. The bigger, less visible advantage is ownership of the customer relationship itself: the email address, the purchase history, the ability to reach a customer directly the next time their pet’s food is due for a reorder, rather than depending on a marketplace’s algorithm to resurface a listing.
For a category with the kind of predictable repeat-purchase cycle that pet products have, that direct line to the customer compounds in value with every reorder, in a way that Hugo Galvao defends that a marketplace listing alone simply cannot replicate.
Why the real answer is usually both, sequenced correctly
Framed as a strict choice, this comparison sets up a false trade-off. Businesses running both channels together generate meaningfully more total revenue than those relying on a single channel alone, roughly thirty-eight percent more according to recent retail data. The two models are not really competing for the same job. One is built to get discovered by people who do not know the brand yet. The other is built to keep and grow the relationship once they do.
For a pet business specifically, the natural sequence tends to follow the buyer’s own journey. A marketplace introduces a new customer to the brand at a moment when a purchase decision is being made under time pressure or price comparison. Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho explain that once that customer has bought once, has a good experience and is due to reorder food or supplies on a predictable schedule, an owned website with a direct relationship, saved preferences and a simple reorder flow captures far more of that recurring value than routing the same customer back through a marketplace search every time.
Choosing where to build first
Neither channel makes the other obsolete. What changes is which one deserves the next investment at a given stage of growth. Early on, marketplace visibility usually earns its cost by getting a pet brand in front of customers who would otherwise never find it. As repeat customers accumulate, an owned website starts recovering margin and relationship value that a marketplace was never designed to preserve.
Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho has built Enjoy Pets around exactly that sequencing, using marketplaces to reach new pet owners while keeping the growing base of repeat customers on channels the business actually owns. More on how that balance plays out in practice is available at www.enjoypets.com.br.
