Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and CEO of Enjoy Pets, keeps running into the same puzzle when sellers ask which marketplace deserves the most attention. Recent data on Brazilian shopping habits shows Shopee pulling ahead as the platform people bought from most recently. Ask the same shoppers which platform they would recommend to a friend, though, and Mercado Livre comes out on top.
That contradiction is not noise. It reflects two different jobs a marketplace can do, and pet sellers who understand the difference end up choosing their channels far more deliberately than those chasing whichever platform is growing fastest this quarter.
The click and the recommendation are not the same signal
A purchase tells you a platform won someone’s attention at a specific moment, often because of price, a promotion or simple convenience. A recommendation tells you a platform earned enough trust that the buyer is willing to stake their own credibility on it. For a category like pet products, where a bad experience means a damaged food bag or a late delivery for an animal that cannot skip a meal, that second signal matters more than it might for a cheap accessory.
Brazil’s marketplace competition has also matured past its early phase of aggressive discount coupons and subsidized shipping. Structural factors now decide who wins repeat business: logistics efficiency, predictable delivery windows and a purchase journey the customer trusts from click to doorstep.
Where Shopee earns the click
Shopee’s strength sits in price sensitivity and category breadth, which explains why it captures so many first-time and recent purchases. For a pet brand, that makes it a strong entry point for smaller, low-risk items such as toys, grooming accessories or trial-size treats, where a shopper is comparing prices across several sellers before deciding. It is a harder platform to win loyalty on for recurring, higher-stakes purchases like a large bag of food, precisely because price competition there is intense and buyers switch sellers easily.
Mercado Livre’s advantage comes from a reputation built over years, reinforced by broad logistics infrastructure that reduces the anxiety around delivery times. That combination is exactly what recurring pet purchases reward. Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho indicates that a customer who trusts that their dog’s food will arrive on schedule is far more likely to set up a repeat order on the same platform rather than shop around every month. For sellers, this makes Mercado Livre the stronger channel for building the kind of repeat relationship that lowers acquisition costs over time.
Where Amazon fits into the picture
Amazon occupies a narrower but valuable space: shoppers who already associate the platform with reliability and are comfortable with subscription-style repeat orders. Winning visibility there depends heavily on consistent operational performance, since competition for the featured listing on any given product is intense. In this context, Hugo Galvao notices that Amazon can become a channel for premium or specialized products for pet brands with the operational discipline, where trust in the seller matters as much as the price.
Choosing where to compete first
None of this means a pet brand has to pick one marketplace and ignore the rest. It means matching the platform to the job. Shopee for discovery and price-sensitive first purchases, Mercado Livre for building the repeat relationship that turns a buyer into a subscriber in practice, and Amazon for the segment that already expects consistency as the price of loyalty.
Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho has applied that same logic to how Enjoy Pets structures its presence across marketplaces, treating each platform as a different stage of the same customer relationship rather than three competing bets. More on that approach is available at www.enjoypets.com.br.
