Amazon’s Pet Food Sales Hit Billion-Dollar Mark in 2018

25 Feb 2019

Amazon’s Pet Food Sales Hit Billion-Dollar Mark in 2018GlobalPETS | Amazon's Pet Food Sales Hit Billion-Dollar Mark in 2018

Pet food sales on Amazon.com reached an estimated $1 billion in sales in 2018, up 20 percent compared to 2017.

In a previous report, Edge by Ascential found that the pet food and feeding supplies category accounted for more than half of all pet sales on Amazon in the U.S. with an estimated $365 million in Q3 2018, nearly six times the size of the next largest category in pet products.

According to brand measurement calculations from Edge’s Market Share solution, the top five pet food brands (and their share of total pet food sales) on Amazon.com for 2018 are:

  • Blue Buffalo (11 percent)
  • Purina (9 percent)
  • Hill’s (8 percent)
  • Wellness (6 percent)
  • Greenies (5 percent)

“Blue Buffalo’s continued top-selling status illustrates how important it is for brands to incorporate in their packaging what consumers are looking for: healthier pet foods. Blue Buffalo’s top seller contains the keywords ‘Protection Formula’ and ‘Natural’ in the title,” said Pete Andrews, director of insights at Edge by Ascential. “The brand includes in-depth content on their product detail pages along with complete ingredient lists, nutritional information, numerous customer reviews and peer-answered questions. 

The Blue Buffalo brand understands how important community is to the pet owner, whether they are shopping online or in-store. By encouraging consumer interaction on Amazon, brands can recreate some of the interactivity that pet owners value from brick-and-mortar stores.”

Other top performing brands on Amazon in 2018 like No. 2 Purina (up 13 percent year-over-year), No. 10 Rachael Ray (up 27 percent year-over-year) and No. 6 Fancy Feast (up 17 percent year-over-year) demonstrate that pet owners are choosing brands with the right combination of pet nutrition and shopper value. Brands that lost market in 2018 took their customer loyalty for granted–for example, Taste of the Wild, which discontinued some of its most popular 15-pound and 30-pound bags and replaced them with 14-pound and 28-pound bags but kept the same prices, dropped out of the top 10 and lost more than 20 percent market share in 2018.

“Amazon’s own label Wag, launched halfway through 2018, brought in almost $2 million in sales in 2018, a negligible share in the current pet food category. Not long after its Wag launch, Amazon began offering its dry dog food under the Solimo private brand as well. Much of the on-page content is nearly identical but Solimo actually offers more A+ content and a cheaper equivalent to Wag,”  Andrews said. “Whether this is an A/B test on Amazon’s part to identify the effects of small product differences on sales or a transition away from Wag is yet to be determined–but it does suggest that Amazon is not yet ready to challenge major pet food brands head-on while they still gather experimental data.”