Amazon’s Growing Dominance in a Competitive UK Pet Supply category

Pet Supplies is a complex, competitive category with a number of brands fighting for share across a vast number of sub categories and retailers. In the offline retail space, we have seen Pets At Home as one of the most recognisable household names for any pet lover. In the online space we can see a different story, Amazon is now dominating the space. To find common ground between specialists and Amazon, we focused on Total Visits to “dog” related pages as one of the most popular pets. The results were astonishing, we can see Amazon drove 5X the amount of traffic vs Pets At Home over the past 12 months through desktop devices which gives strong indication of their online presence.

Source: Similarweb - Desktop website visits comparison for URLs that contain “dog” - April-22 to March-23

This trend has remained throughout the whole 12 month period with some signs of additional dominance when comparing Pets At Home and Amazon. This gives indication that customers prefer to shop on Amazon for their Pets over specialist sites which could be because of it having the most competitive prices, large assortments and they expect great convenience.

Source: Similarweb - segment analysis - URLs that contain “dog” - last 12 months

Amazon has great presence when it comes to Dog related items but looking at the details, we can see that the Pet Supplies category on the marketplace is much more comprehensive. Using Tambo Compass, we looked at the revenue driven through the top 100 best selling products in March 2023 for the Pet Supplies category. We can see that the dog share is the largest but also seeing considerable share through cats and small amounts of revenue for more obscure pets based on this small amount of sample data alone. We would expect significant layers of depth for other pets with considerable revenue associated through the products that consumers might buy.

Source: Tambo Compass - Categories by “Pet Supplies - March 2023

Based on the same 100 Best Sellers for Pet Supplies, we can see Food being one of the largest sub categories with 44% of the Dogs share. Despite a number of categories appearing to be smaller or not appearing at all, Amazon still have considerable revenue through a number of areas such as Leads & Harnesses, Dog Poo Bags and Probiotics just to name a few visible sub categories. This highlights itself as being a prime opportunity for any brand or retailer to explore the opportunity for their products and add another revenue stream.

Source: Tambo Compass - Categories by “Dog” > “Pet Supplies” - March 2023

From a search perspective, we can see a huge amount of search volume through a number of search queries. Below we can see that “dog beds” exploded in demand in 2019 being the largest searched term and has remained consistent since (left axis) and “dog poo bags” has grown over time and has peaked in recent months (right axis) potentially due to many of reasons consumers term to Amazon as highlighted throughout this piece.

Source: Tambo Compass - Search Volumes - “dog beds” & “dog poo bags” - Jan 2019 to Mar 2023

Summary

The pet supplies market has clear specialist leaders such as Pets at Home but the market is shifting and consumers are looking to Amazon more and more potentially because of the cost, convenience and trust they put in the platform for all of their needs. This indicates that Amazon is an essential place to be for the Pet Supplies category, the opportunity is enormous and should be considered a key part to any brands digital strategy. Through Tambo Compass we can identify and leverage new trends that are emerging within this category, focusing on attributes such as sustainability, pricing and content to understand why products are performing well. Our proprietary tech provides insights that can help brands set up, launch and optimise on Amazon and other marketplaces. Get in touch for a demo and to understand how Tambo can help your business grow.

Download our recent Amazon Vs Google Search report for more insight on the category.

Irena Popa, Senior Marketplace Executive +
Joe Farley, Associate Director, Consultancy