Brazil’s pet industry is expected to generate more than R$80 billion in revenue, according to recent industry projections, with pet food alone accounting for more than half of what pet owners spend on their animals each year. For such a frequently purchased and highly competitive product category, pricing on online marketplaces is no longer a decision made once and forgotten at the end of the month.
According to entrepreneur Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and director of Enjoy Pets, understanding how dynamic pricing works has become essential for any pet business looking to compete effectively on platforms such as Mercado Livre, Shopee, and Amazon, where dozens of sellers often list the same products simultaneously.
What Is Dynamic Pricing in Practice?
Unlike fixed pricing, which is established once and maintained for months, dynamic pricing adjusts selling prices based on variables that can change almost daily. These factors include competitors’ pricing, available inventory levels, fluctuations in demand throughout the day or month, and even a product’s ranking within the marketplace itself.
These adjustments can be made manually by reviewing pricing spreadsheets on a regular basis or through automated tools that monitor competitors in real time and either recommend or implement price changes without requiring human intervention for every update. Smaller businesses often begin with manual pricing management and transition to automation as their product catalogs grow and manual reviews become impractical.
Why Do Pet Food and Recurring Purchases Require Extra Attention?
Frequently purchased products, such as pet food, are especially sensitive to even small price differences because pet owners compare prices regularly and have little tolerance for paying more for an identical product available from another seller. Keeping prices unchanged while competitors continuously adjust theirs often results in declining sales without an obvious explanation. The product remains available—it simply loses visibility among the marketplace’s top search results.
The pricing system developed by Enjoy Pets was designed specifically for these highly competitive categories, where even minor price adjustments can have a disproportionately large impact on sales volume. A one-cent difference may seem insignificant on its own, but for fast-moving products that customers frequently compare, that small adjustment can determine which listing appears first in a pet owner’s search results.
The Risks of Automating Pricing Without Clear Rules
Not every automated pricing strategy is a good one. Lowering prices solely to improve marketplace rankings without considering minimum acceptable profit margins is a common mistake among businesses that implement automation without establishing clear pricing rules beforehand.
Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho recommends setting a minimum profit margin before enabling any automated pricing system, ensuring that competitive pricing does not become a hidden source of financial losses. Without this safeguard, automated tools may continue lowering prices even after sales are no longer profitable, particularly during highly competitive promotional periods when multiple sellers reduce prices at the same time.
How Can Businesses Balance Competitiveness and Healthy Margins?
The most effective approach typically involves segmenting products according to their strategic importance. Highly competitive products, such as well-known pet food brands, may operate with lower margins to maximize sales volume, while niche products with fewer direct competitors can maintain higher margins without sacrificing competitiveness.
According to Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, this strategy prevents businesses from applying the same pricing logic across their entire catalog when, in reality, each product category requires a different approach within the same marketplace. Exclusive or specialty products, for example, do not need to participate in the same aggressive price competition as products sold by dozens of competing retailers.
What Does Dynamic Pricing Really Mean for the Digital Pet Market?
Dynamic pricing is not about constantly lowering prices—it’s about making informed pricing adjustments based on real-time data while staying within predefined business limits. When implemented strategically, it helps businesses avoid both stagnant pricing that reduces competitiveness and unnecessary price wars that erode profit margins. Achieving this balance requires ongoing monitoring and refinement rather than a one-time pricing configuration.
Ultimately, Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho views dynamic pricing as a sign of operational maturity—one of the factors that distinguishes pet businesses that simply sell on marketplaces from those that truly understand the pricing dynamics of today’s highly competitive e-commerce environment, where carefully calculated adjustments often deliver greater results than occasional deep discounts.
