Pet Industry Ecommerce Benchmarks (2026): Repeat Purchase Rate, CLV and Loyalty

Short answer: Pet retention is set by what you sell. Subscribers to pet food or supplements place about 5.4 orders a year against 3.7 for toys, bowls and beds, in Recharge's pet subscription data for July 2025 to June 2026. The category leader shows what a consumable-led model can reach: Autoship customers generated 83.3% of net sales and net sales per active customer were $591 in Chewy's fiscal 2025 annual report. No benchmark publishes a pet-specific 12-month repeat purchase rate yet, so this report sets tiers from the closest replenishment and occasional-purchase categories, where Shopify medians run from 11.6% to 32.2% in By the Numbers' benchmark of 1,326 Shopify stores.

Key figures at a glance

Pet is two businesses sharing one category

Most pet retention advice treats the category as one replenishment business. The revenue says otherwise. In Chewy's fiscal 2025 10-K, consumables grew 4.5%, hardgoods grew 13.4% and pet health and specialty products grew 11.8%. On our calculation from the same table, consumables were 69.7% of net sales, pet health 15.7%, hardgoods 11.4% and other revenue 3.2%. Roughly 85 cents of every dollar comes from products a pet uses up.

A store-led retailer with a bigger durables and services mix tells the same story from the other side. In Petco's 10-K for the year to February 1, 2025, consumables sales fell 0.7% while supplies and companion animals fell 6.2%. Consumables were about half of Petco's net sales by our calculation, so a weak durables year hit the total far harder than it would at a consumable-led brand.

The subscription data shows why the split matters. Recharge found that the average pet food or supplement subscriber places about 5.4 orders a year and the average durables subscriber about 3.7, which it describes as roughly 45% more orders (Recharge pet subscription data, 20,000+ brands). It also found that the two groups renew at about the same rate cycle to cycle. Consumable subscribers are not more loyal per order; they simply come up for reorder more often. On our calculation, 5.4 orders a year means a gap of about 68 days between orders, against about 99 days at 3.7.

That gives an independent pet brand its first decision: benchmark the consumable side and the durable side separately. A store that sells food and toys and reports one blended repeat purchase rate is averaging two different clocks, and the blend moves with product mix rather than retention.

What good looks like: tiers by catalogue mix

By the Numbers lists pet food among the categories with too few stores to publish a 12-month repeat purchase rate. The nearest published proxies bracket the pet category from both ends. Replenishment categories sit at the top of the repeat purchase table by industry and occasional-purchase categories near the bottom, with the all-store median between them.

We map those distributions onto three pet catalogue types, using the 12-month repeat purchase rate. The thresholds use each proxy group's published quartiles, rounded, so they are a reasoned starting point rather than a measured pet benchmark.

Source: quartiles from By the Numbers, 12-month repeat purchase rate by industry; tier boundaries are our mapping.

Two reasons the consumable-led tier should sit at the replenishment end rather than in the middle. Pet food has fixed, predictable consumption, the same mechanism that drives the supplement and coffee medians. And the pet subscriber data later in this report shows lower churn than supplements, coffee or beauty, so a well-run pet food store has no structural reason to trail those categories.

The durable-led tier is not a weaker version of the same business. A toy or bed brand in the strong band may be doing very well. Its retention job is a second, different product (a new toy, a travel crate, a seasonal coat) and a referral, not a reorder of the first.

The Autoship bar, and what it actually measures

Chewy's Autoship share is the number every pet founder hears, and it is easy to misread. Chewy counts an Autoship customer as anyone who had an Autoship order shipped in the preceding 364 days, and Autoship customer sales include everything those customers buy, inside or outside the program (Chewy 10-K definitions). It is a measure of revenue concentration in subscribed households, not the share of orders placed on subscription.

The share is still rising. In the second quarter of fiscal 2026, Autoship customer sales reached 84.6% of net sales and net sales per active customer rose to $602. Active customers grew 3.8% over the same period, so Chewy is growing mostly by deepening spend in households it already has.

Survey data shows how far that behaviour reaches beyond Chewy. Packaged Facts research cited in Chewy's 10-K found that 49% of online pet product buyers had used an Autoship or subscription program in the previous 12 months, and 31% of pet parents had used subscription buying for pet food. A minority of pet parents subscribe, yet subscribed households account for more than four-fifths of the category leader's revenue. That is the bar: not "most customers subscribe", but "most revenue comes from customers who do".

For an independent Shopify brand the equivalent metric is the share of trailing 12-month revenue from customers with a subscription order in the last 364 days. A consumable-led brand below half on that measure has most of its revenue in customers with no standing reason to come back.

Reconciling the pet numbers

These figures measure different things and should not be compared directly.

Sources: Chewy fiscal 2025 10-K, Recharge pet subscription data, Recharge renewal-cycle data, By the Numbers repeat purchase benchmark.

One reconciliation is worth doing yourself. If a household spending $591 a year bought in baskets the size of the median Shopify pet order, it would place about 8.8 orders a year. Chewy does not publish order counts or basket size, so this is our illustration only, but it suggests the leader's customers buy more often than the 5.4 orders of the average independent food subscriber, or in larger baskets, or both. Frequency and basket size are the two levers that close the gap.

Subscription retention: pet is the steadiest consumable

Recharge compared renewal cycles across five consumable verticals. Pet supplies had the highest process rate at 75.9% and the lowest active churn at 15.4% of cycles (Recharge renewal-cycle data, July 2025 to June 2026).

The same analysis followed new subscribers through their reorders. In pet supplies, 96.2% reached the first reorder, 15.3% the sixth and 3.1% the twelfth (Recharge cohort data). The early drop that hurts supplements barely exists in pet. The loss is slow and steady instead, so the work in pet is keeping subscribers through months three to twelve rather than rescuing the first reorder.

Recharge's wider cohort study of 65.1 million subscriptions at 13,158 Shopify brands points the same way: pet has the least dramatic drop-off between the first and second order, and retention depends more on what the subscriber does at each order than on billing cadence (Recharge quarterly billing analysis). A skipped order is the warning sign. Catch it with a swap, a pause or a reason to stay, rather than a longer billing interval.

Species matters too. Among pet food and supplement brands, cat subscriptions churn at about 17% and dog subscriptions at about 14%, with renewal at 76% for cats and 78% for dogs (Recharge pet subscription data). Cat food brands should plan for a leakier subscriber base and put more of their budget into keeping subscribers than winning them.

Worked example: a 10,000-customer pet food brand

The median pet store on Shopify has an average order value of $67 (By the Numbers' order value benchmark). Take an example brand at that order value with 10,000 customers in the last 12 months, food and treats as most of its revenue, and 1,500 active cat food subscribers.

Lever 1: one-time buyers, from typical to strong. In the example, a 25% repeat purchase rate means 2,500 customers order again within the year. Moving to 32%, just inside the strong consumable tier above, would add 700 repeat customers. At one extra order each that would be at least $46,900 in revenue, before any third or fourth orders.

Lever 2: subscribers, from cat-level to dog-level retention. Treat each renewal cycle as a fixed chance of renewing and a fixed chance of cancelling, and the expected number of renewal orders per subscriber is the renewal rate divided by the churn rate. In this worked example, cat-level rates (76% renew, 17% churn) give about 4.5 renewal orders and dog-level rates (78% renew, 14% churn) give about 5.6. The extra 1.1 orders per subscriber would be worth about $74 at $67 an order, or roughly $110,600 across 1,500 subscribers. The model is simple and real churn is front-loaded, but the direction holds: three points of churn per cycle is worth more than a large lift in one-time repeat rate.

Lever 3: attach durables to food customers. Durables subscribers order less often and toy buyers rarely reorder the same item, so durables are better sold to existing food customers than used to acquire new ones. Chewy's hardgoods grew faster than its consumables in fiscal 2025, into a customer base that was already buying food. The equivalent for the example brand is a toy or accessory recommendation on the food reorder, not a separate acquisition campaign.

The ranking that falls out of this: protect subscriber retention first, move one-time food buyers onto a subscription or reorder routine second, and sell durables into that base third.

Reorder timing: set the clock by bag size

A consumable reorder is due when the bag runs out, so the reminder schedule should come from pack size and pet size, not a fixed 30-day flow. If your best-selling bag lasts a medium dog about five weeks, a day-30 reminder is early and a day-60 reminder arrives after the customer has bought elsewhere. Map each SKU to its expected days of use and send the first reminder a few days before it runs out.

Shopify-wide data shows how much repeat business arrives after the first month. Across all stores, 6.6% of new customers placed a second order within 30 days, 11.4% within 90 days and 19.5% within a year (By the Numbers second-order benchmark). For health food and supplements, a replenishment proxy, the figures were 9.0%, 20.0% and 29.3%. A pet food store should look like the replenishment row, with most second orders landing in the first 90 days. If yours looks like the all-store row, the reminders are mistimed or the first bag did not convince.

Automated flows do this work best. In Klaviyo's 2026 benchmarks, flows generated nearly 41% of email revenue from 5.3% of sends (Klaviyo email benchmarks, 183,000+ customers). A replenishment reminder keyed to bag size is exactly the kind of flow that earns that share.

Durables run on occasions, not clocks: a new pet, a birthday, a chewed-through toy, a change of season. Collect the pet's birthday and species at sign-up and time durable offers to those events.

How to measure your pet store in Shopify

• Split repeat purchase rate by first product type. Build customer segments by the product type of the first order (food, treats, toys, accessories) and calculate the 12-month rate for each. Compare the food segment with the consumable-led tier and the toy segment with the durable-led tier.
• Do not confuse repeat purchase rate with returning customer rate. Shopify's returning customer rate counts customers who bought before the period (Shopify analytics field definitions), so it runs far higher than a repeat purchase rate over the same window.
• Know the gap between the two. Across 1,421 stores, the 90-day median returning customer rate was 34.4% while the 90-day median repeat purchase rate was 11.1% (By the Numbers).
• Track your own Autoship-style share. Tag subscribers through your subscription app, then divide trailing-year sales from customers with a subscription order in the past year by total sales. Shopify's customer reports and segment exports give you the inputs.
• Watch churn per renewal cycle, and skips. Compare your own active churn per cycle with the pet benchmark above, and split it by species if you sell both cat and dog food.

The video below covers building lifetime value across the full customer journey, from first order to loyal customer. In pet food that journey is mostly decided by whether the second bag arrives before the first one runs out.

Where Mage fits

Mage is a Shopify loyalty app, and its pet loyalty program is built around the levers above. It awards points on subscription sign-up and every renewal through the Recharge and Skio integrations, adds milestone bonuses at 3, 6 and 12 months, gives bonus points for reorders made on schedule and for switching from one-time purchase to subscription, and collects pet birthdays at sign-up to trigger rewards for the occasion-driven side of the catalogue. The Customer Journey Playbook shows how those pieces fit together. To check the program is working, compare members with non-members on subscriber churn per cycle and the share of revenue from subscribed households.

For related categories, see the supplement and health benchmarks, food and beverage benchmarks and subscription box benchmarks.