Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and director of Enjoy Pets, observes something he considers crucial: A five-real cat toy and a fifteen-kilo bag of dog food should never cost the same to ship, yet many pet e-commerce operations still charge one flat rate for both. The toy arrives fine and the freight fee feels reasonable to the buyer. The food arrives late, sometimes torn, and the seller absorbs a shipping cost that eats most of the margin on the sale. It is noted, then, that this flat-rate habit is one of the most common mistakes in pet retail logistics, mostly because it looks like simplicity rather than the risk it actually is.
A rule that looks efficient but isn’t
Setting one shipping profile per store is easier to manage than setting one per product category, so many sellers do exactly that as the catalog grows. It works fine while the store sells mostly small accessories. It stops working the moment heavy bags of food, litter or large crates enter the mix, because those items behave nothing like a toy or a leash once a courier weighs the package.
The result is a catalog priced for convenience rather than for cost. Light items end up carrying a shipping fee higher than they need, pushing price-sensitive buyers toward a competitor with a lighter, cheaper listing. Heavy items carry a fee lower than the real freight cost, so every sale of a large bag quietly subtracts from the day’s profit instead of adding to it.
Why does uniform shipping quietly drain margin?
Carriers charge by whichever is greater between actual weight and cubic weight, and pet food sits at the exact intersection of both: it is heavy and it takes up space. A shipping rate built months earlier, when the catalog leaned toward smaller items, stops matching reality once bulkier products take a larger share of orders. Renegotiating that rate after the fact is possible, but most sellers only think to do it once the losses are already visible on a spreadsheet. Hugo Galvao explains that many operations treat this gap as a rounding error until it accumulates into a real line on the balance sheet.
The damage rarely shows up order by order. A single underpriced heavy SKU can offset the margin earned across dozens of small-ticket sales, and most sellers only notice the pattern when they review total shipping costs at the end of a quarter, not while it is happening in real time. By then, the store may have processed hundreds of orders at a loss without anyone flagging it as a problem.
What a weight-based approach looks like in practice?
Correcting this means splitting the catalog into weight and dimension tiers, then assigning a shipping rule to each tier instead of to the store as a whole. Since freight tables differ between Mercado Livre, Shopee and Amazon, the same product can need three different shipping configurations depending on where it is listed.
At Enjoy Pets, Hugo Galvao applies that segmentation across the pet catalog, treating sachets, medium packs and bulk bags as separate shipping categories rather than variations of the same product. That distinction is what keeps a fifteen-kilo bag from quietly draining the margin built by dozens of smaller sales.
What changes for the customer once shipping matches the product
A buyer who orders a large bag of food notices when the package arrives intact and on schedule, and notices just as quickly when it does not. Damaged deliveries and delayed heavy items generate a disproportionate share of complaints and returns in pet e-commerce, precisely because the product itself is harder to handle than most categories sold online.
Hugo de Galvao de Franca Filho concludes then that getting the shipping rule right for each product is not a back-office detail. It shapes whether a customer trusts the store enough to place a second order for something as routine and as heavy as next month’s bag of food.